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MYSTICISM AND MYSTERY
Author(s): Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent Date: June 15, 2006 Page: E8 Section: STYLE / ARTS
Commercial galleries often wait until the drowsy summer months to show untried artists. Alpha Gallery is the first out of the gates with its "New Talent" show each June. This year's exhibition, featuring three painters and a photographer, has fizzy appeal. The work is sharp and eye-catching. While technically accomplished, it's also in three of the four cases the work of young artists who have chosen a theme and hammered it home, rather than letting it open up and evolve.
The exception is Shalini M. Bhat, who just received her master's degree at Boston University. Bhat came to Boston from her native India; her paintings embrace both Eastern mysticism and the Western push toward individuality.
Bhat paints in dreamy layers of cobalt blue; drawings and patterns emerge along the surface, and all mysteriously tie together. "Me and Her" shows two figures facing each other both self-portraits of Bhat in a yoga posture with shoulders raised and hands held up. One wears traditional Indian garb; the other wears loose pants and a T-shirt. Palm prints walk through the sea of blue around them; green patterns swirl into dissolving ribbons. Orange strands from the figures' hair dance all over the canvas and land on the head of another woman in the distance. So much quietly happens here, it's engrossing.
Another BU graduate, Elizabeth Livingston imbues her realist paintings with Hitchcockian edginess. "58 Verndale" has the dramatic lighting of one of Gregory Crewdson's spooky photographs, with a dark, suburban house filling the background, and a dour young woman standing across from a garish forsythia in the foreground. If Livingston's not upending the viewer with light and shadow, she uses perspective. In "Oak Hill," bowls and a serving fork loom in the foreground as a young woman gazes out a window.
Shira Avidor, also from BU (Alpha has a long history with the BU MFA program), paints rail-thin, distorted, and implacable young women surrounded by platters of sweets. It's today's version of the Dutch still life, with an anorexic twist. As with the Dutch works, there's the reminder of life's fleeting quality, even amid the plenty. In "Jamie With Meringues," a skull sits on the table, its teeth resting unnervingly on one of the plates.
Robert Knight, the sole photographer, shoots interiors of people's homes as if they were portraits. These are telling and rich, although not as layered as an actual portrait can be. "Stephen, Boston (South End) MA" shows the ornate, pillow-tossed bed against a wall papered, apparently, with silver-leaf and adorned with crystal sconces.
Knight, Avidor, and Livingston each take a particular focus or tension and hone it to a psychological knife's edge. Bhat has tension in her work as well, but she doesn't seem interested in ratcheting it up; she's more interested in what it has to tell her, and that makes for more nuanced art. |
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