Damien Hoar de Galvan’s funky two-sided sculptures take on added meaning when shown beside three of his drawings at Carroll and Sons.
On their own, the drawings are throwaways: angsty text such as “always been scared” and “I don’t know what I believe,” scrawled in ink on paper — the mutterings of anyone’s doubts. Hoar de Galvan’s sculptures provide a retort charged with the same fraught energy, yet tumbling toward a salvation found in obsessive craft, smart design, and puzzle-solving.
“Everything in Its Right Place” — the title alone rebuts the drawings — is a construction of bits of wood in a flawed circle filled with intersecting curves and angles. The wood shards, colored along the edges, look massaged to fit. I could picture the artist at work, contemplating his scraps like jigsaw-puzzle pieces, determining how they would best work together.
There’s tension in the lines, but the hues aim to please. That’s how most of Hoar de Galvan’s structures come across: inviting, but packed with contradictions. “Star” is another off-kilter circle (the shape suggests a portrait), with lime-green radii. The artist jams colored tabs of wood into the pie slices in between. A whirling rush of jittery movement throbs beneath the green star.
Hoar de Galvan’s works walk a fine line between neurosis and friendliness. One piece, the gloriously goopy “Hangin’ On,” breaks out of that pattern. He made the totem, perched swollen on a red pedestal, from scores of bottle caps and beery-looking glue. Still obsessive, it’s looser, bolder, and gaudier than the wood sculptures — art on a bender.
Nancy Murphy Spicer’s “Disrupted Drawings” in Carroll and Sons’ back room perfectly complements Hoar de Galvan’s humble aesthetic. Murphy Spicer treats rice paper with gesso — the stuff painters use to prep a canvas. Then she paints a blobby form or two, cuts up the paper, and reconfigures it into a collage.
In “Disrupted Drawing Small 16” she stacked three orange and pink lozenges, then she cut a section down the middle and simply inverted it. Now the orange form at the top has pink in the middle, and so on, to a squishy, skewed effect, both architectural and fleshly. To this, she collages a scrap of frayed olive green linen, jutting to one side, a stained and tattered flag. Like the nerd crowned prom queen, Murphy Spicer’s works glory in the awkwardness of it all.
Man. Machines. Nature.
There’s nothing awkward about “The Disrupted Landscape,” the group photo show at Miller Yezerski Gallery about people interacting with nature. The sheer beauty of the photographs overpowers the theme, which only loosely ties the images together. In some, humans use nature to enchant. In others, humans wreak havoc. So what’s new?
But what a group of photos! Let’s start with Alex MacLean’s lush aerial photo “Tailing Piles, Mountain Iron, MN.” The texture and pattern of the piles resembles that of textiles; the red pit just below, streaked with trails, looks painterly. Likewise, David Maisel’s overhead image “The Fall Project, Borox 6,” depicting a mining and agricultural area in Spain, is as loopy as a Brice Marden painting, with white tracks curling erratically over an ash-gray field. In both, the landscape stands on a border between realism and abstraction.
Thomas Jackson intervenes in nature on his own, to magical effect — his “Yarn no. 2” captures a wild, neon-bright construction of yarn strung on nylon line amid trees and bushes, like the afterglow of a mighty laser-tag battle. In “Lovell 2AM,” Scott Peterman’s mystical photo of a flashlight in a Maine field at night, the extended exposure turns the sky pearly gray and reveals a curtain of mist over the flashlight’s funnel of light, which might be an escape chute for fairies.
Holly Lynton is the only artist here shooting people in the landscape. Her bizarre and provocative “Beidler Forest IV” depicts men and women thigh-deep in a swamp, drumming on trees and stumps. With a canopy of spring leaves above them and its reflection glimmering around their legs, they seem immersed in a world of green. Perhaps they’re the fairies.
Idiosyncrasies that charm
Photographer Jim Dow lovingly documents the vernacular. His show at Robert Klein @ Ars Libri spotlights American taco trucks and their prototypes, Mexican taquerías and South American carritos.
While we can make generalizations about these vendors — in the United States, they’re mobile; elsewhere, they stay in place — it’s their idiosyncrasies that charm. “Pyramid Carrito Selling French Fries, Costanera, Parana, Entre Rios Province, Argentina,” for instance, is a wacky tent with spotlights at its tip and round foldout windows. The logo: fries spilling from a toppled pyramid.
DAMIEN HOAR DE GALVAN:
Wake Up
NANCY MURPHY SPICER: Disrupted Drawings
At: Carroll and Sons, 450 Harrison Ave.,
through Aug. 22. 617-482-2477, www.carrollandsons.net
THE DISRUPTED LANDSCAPE
At: Miller Yezerski Gallery,
460 Harrison Ave.,
through Aug. 14. 617-262-0550, www.milleryezerskigallery.com
JIM DOW:
Taco Trucks, Taquerías, and Carritos
At: Robert Klein Gallery @ Ars Libri,
500 Harrison Ave.,
through Sept. 12. 617-357-5212, www.robertkleingallery.com