Word: exhibition
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...photograph is one of 36 provocative and graphic works by well-known Southern African artists in an exhibit titled "ArtWorks for AIDS," on display through tomorrow at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts as part of the Harvard AIDS Institute's observance of AIDS Awareness Week...
Nearly every work of art in the exhibit has a little didactic text from curator or artist or both hung up alongside it. Each of these is essentially the same, telling us how the piece contributes to the understanding of the individual enmeshed in the destructive forces of a materialist, male society. What really makes this annoying is that the Lois Foster Exhibition is ostensibly an even-handed survey of Boston-area art. In fact, it's a feminist art show-both the curators and all the artists were women and all these earnest bits of text ran along gender...
There is a glimmer of hope in the form of Level Best, a sort of white plastic sculpting material which is Amy Podmore's favorite medium. Her sculpture is about the only thing zany and creative in Boston art, if we are to believe that the exhibit is truly representative. Podmore doesn't need to rely on long-winded mission statements to connect with her viewers. A sculpture reminiscent of Wallace and Gromit's The Wrong Trousers actually works as a statement about childhood, with two pairs of trousers, one big and one small, attached precariously by yarn...
...branch of a birch tree set in a line of darker trees. The result is a poignant, even wrenching, display of innocence alone in a cold environment. Podmore's work doesn't actively attempt to be theoretical and, as a result, is not overbearing like everything else in the exhibit...
Though how these artists were chosen is quite clear, thanks to the beauty of an annual art show's bureaucracy, the reason why these artists were chosen is obscure. Besides Podmore, no artist featured shows any sort of creative innovation. If the exhibit is meant to further discussion of feminist theory, that could be done just as easily with a new book-and the Rose's wonderful museum space could be freed up for something that stands on its own as challenging and interesting...