Spotlight Review

MASSACHUSETTS

Through August 12 at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park. Lincoln, Massachusetts
www.decordova.org
THE 2007 DECORDOVA ANNUAL EXHIBITION

Nathalie Miebach, Boston Tides, reeds, 8' x 35" x 8', 2006.

In the DeCordova Museum’s 2007 annual exhibition, you won’t find paintings, landscapes, or works that focus on physicality or the body. Expressionism, minimalism, conceptualism, much in the way of abstraction, and art that surprises or provokes are all absent. You will find well-crafted works—prints, collage, photographs, sculpture, drawings, and installation—by a fairly narrow range of artists, some of which straddle the borderline between fine art and craft or tend toward illustration.

The show that results from the DeCordova curators’ predilection for overall markmaking, pattern, and decoration hardly exhibits the range of work one would expect from an annual selection in which the goal is to highlight some “of the best, most interesting, and visually eloquent” work being made by New England artists.

That said, there is some appealing work here. In Sarah Amos’s large, multisheet paper works, lines and pattern seem to float over and through the fabric-like surface she has created with collograph and carborundum etching, pencil, and charcoal on Japanese paper. The artist uses a palette of reds, blacks, yellows, and browns and discrete layered marks—dots, dashes, undulating lines, and decorative motifs—to evoke a vast and shifting landscape, Japanese woodcuts, and Australian Aboriginal art. If there is a fault, it is the homogeneity of these sensuously surfaced works.

Craft and sculpture cohabit in Nathalie Miebach’s engaging hanging works, in which polychrome reeds, woven into organic basketry forms, are paired with projecting, Tinkertoy-like elements. Contrast between the twisted bulk of the woven form and the inserted linear elements is sometimes lacking, but is effective at its most dramatic in my favorite piece, Boston Tides.

Anne Krinsky

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