Although there’s been no serious discussion of providing visitors with a compass and roller skates, since last year’s expansion, you can now walk through four miles of gallery space at North Adams’ cavernous Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
Even before entering you can view, through museum windows, Natasha Bowdoin’s mammoth installation of colorful paper flowers. The project required two and a half weeks of onsite labor to install, with the Houston-based artist working primarily solo.
“I can’t give anyone else instructions because I’m actually making the decisions as I do them,” she said on opening night.
With some of the flora popping out from the walls and creeping onto the floor, this three-dimensional artistic meditation on photosynthesis is titled “Maneater.”
The phrase channels an ancient Hall & Oates’ song about a feral woman preying upon unsuspecting males. All in the garden is not calm and restful, and this artwork, 100 feet in length, suggests that the plants are about to consume the museum’s Hunter Hallway.
It’s said that movies are always in search of past images. Bowdoin, an assistant professor at Rice University, both fills her studio and draws inspiration from 19th-century botanists’ drawings, fantastical lunar maps and Victorian images. For the past 12 years, she’s been involved with the complex technique of paper cutting. The clean lines of Maneater are achieved with stencil techniques and precise cuts made with an X-ACTO knife.
She explained that the assembly is also an homage to a Victorian tradition, wherein young ladies would communicate with a suitor through “the language of the flowers.”
Depending on how a bouquet was arranged, the woman could indicate interest or monumental boredom with a male visitor.
“It was sort of a way to pass these secret notes,” Bowdoin said. “It was sort of an alternate language.”
MASS MoCA’s new arrivals range from images of a haunting world of two moons and red-streaked meditations on violence, to the chance to debate with your friends upon the differences between alligators and crocodiles.
Among the contributors to “The Lure of the Dark” exhibit is Brooklyn-based artist Sam McKinniss. From a distance, two wall-sized paintings, each taking up some 42 square feet, seem photographic. One is of an intriguing celestial event.
“I’ve always been attracted to the Northern Lights as a phenomenon because it reminds me of night life, party lighting,” McKinniss said during opening night. “Even though it’s an outrageously beautiful, natural phenomena.”
The artist based the image upon a photograph taken at a national park in northern Minnesota. Earlier, following the 2016 fentanyl death of the North Star State’s most famous rocker, Prince, McKinniss created a portrait of the musician astride a motorcycle. To the artist, the aurora painting seemed an obvious follow-up.
“I work sequentially,” McKinniss said. “In a way, every painting makes me think of another painting.”
Nearby is a large rendering of the singer Lana Del Ray, luminescent in spotlights and glitter, the image based on her performance on TV’s “American Idol.” In an alternate manner, the show biz image is as contemplative as the aurora, considering the double edge of our celebrity-obsessed culture.
One critic has said that McKinniss’ work spans from the cute to the morbid. He’s rendered President Obama as blowing bubbles, while also painting the tragic child beauty contestant JonBénet Ramsey. Followers of the singer Lorde, aka Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor, will recognize the artist’s work on the cover of her “Melodrama” CD.
There are more than a dozen artists in the exhibit, and among the more surreal works are canvases by the German expatriate Wilhelm Neusser. Some of his twilight images are illuminated by two moons. In other images, figures are indistinct and a bucolic landscape may be disturbed with an incongruous slash of fiery color. The artist, now a Cambridge resident, noted in a 2016 interview in Boston’s contemporary art magazine Big Red & Shiny that sanding bits and an electrical drill were among his studio tools.
“What interests me is how illusion in a painting can overlap with physical surfaces and materials,” he said. He noted that incongruous crusts of paint are added “so that my material itself became a landscape.”
Neusser was raised in an agricultural area, and saw the lands of his grandfather’s farm and surrounding tracts ravaged by industrialized coal mining. His intriguing paintings, greatly influenced by the 19th-century landscape artists, often suggest the upheaval of the natural world.
The Spaniard Jeronimo Elespe’s painting “Hesperides” requires more than a fleeting look. The title refers to the Greek myth of three nymphs who tend an Edenic garden. Within its intricate dappling, there are figures that emerge only after closer study. The panel is so intricately created with raindrops of brush strokes that what you initially see is not what you will later detect.
Six representational paintings titled “Night Window,” created by Josephine Halvorson, depict the interior of a studio in Rome. They are studies in trompe l’oeil, a deception of the eye. From a distance, the darkened windows, in a color that could best be called faded post office green, seem three-dimensional. Halvorson, a professor of art at Boston University, often paints en plein air, and is often just an arm’s length from her outdoor subjects.
“I want to have a real intimacy or connection with the thing I’m painting. I can feel with my brush strokes what it’s like to be the surface of that object,” she said in the video “New York Close Up.”
The 10 large oils that constitute the exhibit “Paintings of Violence” were created by the British artist Rachel Howard. The base, or ground, of the paintings is a fluorescent acrylic pink, and over a period of months she applied a red oil paint vertically, using a T-square to keep the lines tight. The effect is that the paintings seem to glow, as if backlit. The entire project required five years, while other work was underway. Each panel measures five-and-a-half-feet in length and width.
“They’re my height and my arm span, so the paintings relate to me as a physical being,” Howard said.
The exhibit is a contemplation upon violence. Howard has said that she is “squeezed” between the philosophies of the academics Bertrand Russell and C.S. Lewis. Russell argued that Christianity was based upon fear and was responsible for years of bloodshed. Lewis countered that the religion was a holy struggle to find unity with God.
“This is looking at the world around me,” Howard said. “This endless loop of violence, not knowing which war is it? What atrocity is it? This is my way of meditating.”
The works, dominated by beet-red paint, are curiously restful.
Visitors to the museum know they’ve entered multi-media artist Allison Hamilton’s “Pitch” exhibit when they’re dwarfed by some dozen 500-pound upright pine logs suspended by wires. The Floridian’s theme is the environmental landscape and its relationship to people. The battered logs symbolize north Florida’s once rapacious turpentine industry, which, largely employing low-paid black workers, devoured the forests for almost a century.
“A lot of what I’m interested in are these struggles over land and battles over protecting land, protecting populations living on land,” Hamilton said on opening night.
Nearby, there’s a line of mesh dueling masks, many obscured with feathers or other ephemera. The artist, who was impressed some time ago with a fading picture of two black soldiers in swordplay, sees the face guards as suggesting “an element of that warfare over land.”
On the floor are two stuffed alligators, almost as cute as kittens, but not quite. To bring the alligators to this state of repose, Hamilton said the skins require an intensive year-long drying process. While most of us have dedicated our lives to avoiding them, the short, yet lengthy beasts are a part of the economy.
Hamilton hopes viewers will be impressed that environment is not simply a backdrop, but an integral part of who we are and what we were.
“I’m always interested in epic story lines that continue and continue,” she concluded.
“Maneater” continues through January 2019. “Lure of the Dark,” “Paintings of Violence” and “Pitch” continue through February 2019.
MASS MoCA is open every day from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and is closed Tuesday. Admission is $20 for adults, $12 for students with ID and $8 for children ages 6 to 16.
Don Stewart is a freelance writer who lives in Plainfield. He has written for The Recorder since 1994.