Word: visualizes
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Disproving the myth of Boston's cultural paucity is now only a matter of 20 minutes' distance by commuter rail. The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University has mounted a show with the catch-all title of Visual Memoirs: Selected Paintings and Drawings, featuring the work of area artists over the last 25 years and curated by Carl Belz, director emeritus of the museum. Belz had a large part in committing the Rose to its program of displaying local work, especially through the annual exhibitions of Boston's artists. Visual Memoirs surveys the more than 400 works in the Rose...
Defining Boston art as more than a stepchild of the Manhattan scene is a difficult task, made all the more so for the fact that, in the recent past, regional essentialism hasn't characterized the art in any obvious way. No one visual mode can definitively be called "the art of New England." The works at the Rose do share one quality, though: save a few pieces, Visual Memoirs is a wall-mounted show. What the artists manage to do with that two-dimensional, vertically oriented space is an amazing thing. Concurrent with the much-touted death of painting...
...Measuring Niagara with a Teaspoon, benefits greatly from her title and written explication--"Georgian silver spoon drawn to the height of Niagara Falls." Likewise, Measuring Liberty with a Dollar, made of a silver dollar drawn into a wire the height of the Statue of Liberty, is not primarily a visual experience. If we didn't have Parker's clever titles and explanations, one work might easily be cast aside as a messy tangle of wire, while the other, neatly coiled, has only some nice, simple formal qualities...
...some level, her art seems more dependent on the play of language than visual ingenuity. A number of her found objects make this particularly clear, such as Breath of a Librarian, a deflated black balloon found in the reading room of the British Library. Works like this might lead us to wonder whether collector, rather than sculptor, might be a better description for Parker...
...best of Parker's work, like "Room for Margins," depend on such effective combinations of the visual and the narrative aspects of her art. The most memorable have as much visual as verbal wit, and can stand alone without the extra information, the story, imparted by the caption. A visit to a firearm factory yielded two Colt 45 revolvers, arrested mid-production and polished, so that they look soft and immature, almost harmless. Visually, the pair of handguns look like two Nefertitis moving in for a kiss...