Architecture in New England

Peter Vanderwarker, John Hancock #3888, 2013, type C print, 30 x 40″. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery NAGA.

It’s a die-hard urban myth that Boston’s streets were laid out by wandering cows. Nonetheless, Boston’s growth has been nothing if not organic.

Early Bostonians built their houses wherever they wished. The streets were paved around them, bequeathing an unplanned urban topography confusing to natives and tourists alike. The exhibition Architecture in New England is itself an eclectic mix of contemporary paintings, drawings, historic photographs, prints, objects, and plans from Boston’s Colonial era to the present. Besides contemporary photography and paintings on loan from Gallery NAGA and Alpha Gallery, complementary historical material includes technical drawings and illustrations from the Boston Public Library archive and Historic New England.

The exhibition brings together artists whose work responds to Boston’s 250 years of architecture as less a hodgepodge of old and new than a dialectics of displacement and integration. At least through the eyes of contemporary artists Ben Aronson, Reed Kay, Richard Raiselis, and Peter Vanderwarker, Boston’s architectural styles form a self-reflective mélange characterized as much by merger as by separation.

Photographer Peter Vanderwarker’s work courts unsteadiness and dislocation, often uniting incongruity and continuity in a single image. His elevated images shot from skyscrapers function as narrations of time, allowing the viewer to hover in space as they witness, from ground to sky, the progression of style through time. In his C-print John Hancock #3888 the disarticulated image reflected in the shimmering glass façade of the Hancock Building functions as a framework for an unmoored history of Bostonian architecture. The shaky image reads opaque and unsettling, even as it unites architectural elements comprising the Public Gardens, the stony 19th-century houses of Beacon Hill, the original 1920s Hancock Building, and the modern skyscrapers that have nestled in around them all.

Painters Richard Raiselis, Ben Aronson and Reed Kay use color and design to knit, meld, and blur the boundaries of individual structures within a single visual plane. As curated by SNHU professor Colin Root, the contemporary images in Architecture in New England serve to show that architecture, though perhaps separated by nearly three centuries, is in constant conversation with itself and that, in this sense, walls do not delimit space but extend it.