Eamon Brown, Untitled, mixed media, 2008.

The tombstone of iconic Providence writer H.P. Lovecraft, a popular author of macabre and weird tales during the age of the pulps, reads “I AM PROVIDENCE.” The epitaph, taken from one of his letters, reveals his obsession with the city that inspired his work, a place he loved as “that universal haven of the odd, the free and the dissenting.”

Since the 1990s, two prominent strains of a Lovecraftian vibe have emerged within the Providence arts scene, one defined by a fascination with the city’s traditions, architecture, and decadence; and another that explores conceptual notions of space, time, alternate dimensions, and collective spiritual transformation. Shadow Out of Time, a group exhibition of twenty-four Providence artists showing through January 25 at Boston University’s 808 Gallery, touches on his more transcendent interests in a myriad of ways.

The title is taken from a Lovecraft short story about an ancient, extraterrestrial race that travels through space and time, switching bodies with hosts to study the history and culture of various epochs and places. The species’ mission is to amass a “library city,” filled with the past and future heritage of multiple races, including humans. The exhibition, co-curated by Haley O’Connor and Natalie Purkey of Providence’s Stairwell Gallery, in collaboration with BU’s School of Visual Arts, represents one possible vision of that library.

Lynne Cooney, exhibitions director at BU’s School of Visual Arts, said that when she introduced some of her Boston-based students to the work, they were blown away. “They kept saying, ‘This is wild,’ ‘This is so out there,’” Cooney said of the Providence artists. “They’re creating work for the times we live in, and the times are very strange.”

Many of the pieces are paradoxically both reverent and satirical, subverting contemporary and cultural icons, while simultaneously creating awareness of their pervasive influence and providing space to meditate and reflect on these ideas. Multiple approaches are used, ranging (or combining) installation with video projection, sound, performance art, sculpture and assemblage, and painting and screenprinting.

Stainhenge, a mixed-media work by Purkey and Muffy Brandt, occupies the center of the room and presents a replicated Stonehenge made from dirty mattresses. The mattresses, with their varying colors of blue, copper, and purple, showing floral imagery amid rips, stains, and rust spots, stand upright in a ring of six, surrounding two trilithons. Walking among the mattress megaliths in whimsical reverie, we contemplate the universal role of the bed in human culture as a setting for sleep, dreams, and sex. In its deteriorated state, as found-object art, it also represents the passage of time and life. Adding to the mystery, the artists display the mattresses not in their traditional horizontal position, but standing vertically, a feat accomplished by the labor-intensive process of ripping them open, placing wood and brick at their bottoms, filling them with boxes, and then stitching them back again.

Barkev Gulesserian’s marvelous Dog, a massive, plaster and gold-spray-painted canine Buddha, also slyly subverts the sacred while inviting awe. The gilded figure strikes a traditional Buddha pose, complete with incense sticks and a kneeling bench, offering a wry commentary on the elevated iconography of suburban status and an alternate take on dog-as-spirit-guide symbolism. Eric Rosenthal’s installation, Winter Throne for the Veils of Memory, suggests a more sobering variation on the theme. Made of fabric, wire, wood, and found natural materials, the piece is a vision in white that addresses the relationship between people, nature, and space. Inside, a white bench welcomes meditation.

Eamon Brown’s inventive mixed-media installation, Untitled, takes the notion of relative temporal and spatial awareness in a subtle but novel direction. The piece plays with the idea of sound in space by requiring people in one part of the room to strike objects of cast bronze (“unfinished bells”) that resonate in the gallery and then echo in melodic sequences in a separate part of the room.

Lovecraft, who once admitted that: “Yes, my New England is a dream New England,” would feel at home in this imagined world of transformations and passages. From giant, pink cubes tilted diagonally, to Bunyanesque-sized parodies of violent death (complete with a blood puddle), to the blurring of the cosmic and the contemporary, these young Rhode Island artists have tapped into the same energy that fueled Lovecraft’s most enduring work. One might even say, they are Providence.

Doug Norris is the Rhode Island regional review editor for Art New England, and he writes and edits on art and culture for newspapers in southern Rhode Island.

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