Recently Visited Important Exhibitions: Boston and New Bedford

by Judith Tolnick Champa

I was recently privileged to visit two exhibitions of note. Andrew Mowbray: Another Utopia, has just closed at LaMontagne Gallery in Boston’s South End. www.lamontagnegallery.com 

Ilona Németh: The Harpoon Project, a site-specific installation for New Bedford, continues through January 29 at the University Art Gallery of UMass Dartmouth in downtown New Bedford. www.umassd.edu/universityartgallery

For LaMontagne Gallery Andrew Mowbray, based in Boston, grew and then variously conjoined many molded, modular gourds into an immersive installation. The gourds that have a building block appearance and strength appeared in various sculptural juxtapositions. Mowbry has a great eye for forming aesthetically and structurally compatible wooden bases that interacted with the controlled gourds. In other instances the cubic objects were painted, and strung up, emulated in hydrocal, and Tyvek quilts also were suspended nearby, with stenciled geometric patterns that emerged from and quoted Mowbray’s modular system.

 

 

Many variants within the set of forms created by Mowbray animated the gallery, with lots of space for visitor inspection and participation. Conceptually at play were domestic and “backyard flora” as the gallery described them, with their naturalism and impurity (especially available in the back room that showed the artist’s process of making, including the forced growth of the gourds). These organic objects confronted the opposing sphere of the artist’s actions derived from a structured utopian purity.

 

Mowbray, currently co-director of Architecture and a visiting lecturer in Studio Art at Wellesley College, is sophisticated in his questioning the tension between the natural and the man-made, or abstraction and the everyday, to put it simply, and his own aesthetic biases. Leaning on the late Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1973 video precedent called Splitting, where he and his power-saw famously sliced in two a suburban house, in his own video Mowvray cuts a birdhouse in two, and that birdhouse is also on view adjacent to the video itself. Then, elsewhere in the space, broken pieces of blocks fill the corner, rising up pyramidally, indicating a kind of ironic vexation. Another Utopia, indeed.

Mowbray is someone to watch. He is represented by LaMontagne Gallery in Boston.

Gallery director Viera Levitt, a naturalized Slovakian, has had a long association with fellow Slovakian Ilona Németh, who is active and distinguished internationally as a multi-media artist. Levitt invited her to show this season in the large university gallery complex that she directs. For the current installation eventually called The Harpoon Project, Németh researched New Bedford whaling history, and in the New Bedford Whaling Museum discovered the toggle harpoon that mortally wounded whales. Its design and use accelerated the successful rise of the city’s whaling industry. As the gallery discloses, the harpoon was invented in 1848 by an African American abolitionist and local blacksmith named Lewis Temple. A panel discussion on this topic will take place at UMass Dartmouth this winter (see below).

 

  

Németh envisioned a multiple element installation for the large wooden floor of the UMass main gallery space. As a consequence, Levitt and nearly 50 university and related community volunteers, over several months, created 1,000 handmade ceramic harpoons for the artist, each about 12 inches in length, and these became the materials for the installation. The dark harpoons are arranged on the golden oak floor, dispersed yet all pointing toward the entrance door, like arrows or missiles or a school of crazed fish, yielding “the feeling of threat and admiration” intended by the artist. One can walk among the curved harpoons, and visitors are encouraged to do so to gain different perspectives. However the overall perceptual effect from the gallery door is of an amazingly robust, activated, convex form made up of the multitude of ceramic harpoons, an unstoppable motion. A beautiful installation emerges from the sheer dramatic flow of the handmade objects.

  

 

Ilona Németh is associate professor in the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava, and has taught in Hungary, Budapest, and Oslo. She has held many distinguished residencies internationally and her work is widely exhibited and collected. In this country she has had a Fulbright to NYU; a Vermont Studio Center residency; and a Pollock-Krasner residency in New York.

New Bedford Historical Society and UMass Dartmouth College of Visual and Performing Arts present The Harpoon Project and the Legacy of Lewis Temple
Panel discussion celebrating the legacy of African American abolitionist Lewis Temple, whose toggle harpoon invented in 1848 inspired the creation of The Harpoon Project.
Wednesday, January 29, 2014 at 6 – 8 pm
University Art Gallery

Judith Tolnick Champa is the Editor-In-Chief of Art New England.