Christopher
Millis writing in Boston Phoenix, August 2003
"Grave matters"
Roger Tory Peterson led bird walks
there for years. White-marble monuments
to local legends Isabella Stewart Gardner and Mary Baker Eddy (who’s
reputed to
have had a phone installed in her tomb so as to be in direct posthumous
contact
with the church she founded) tower above their respective man-made
lakes. So
it’s little wonder that Bostonians tend to think of
In fact, even apart from its
revered Colonial burying grounds,
But wait, there’s more. Five years
ago, the Forest Hills Trust began
building on the cemetery’s estimable history as a sculpture garden.
Already
monuments by Martin Milmore and Daniel Chester French decorate the
The concept behind "The 4 Elements"
was to ask artists to draw —
loosely, it turns out — on the four elements that the Greeks believed
to make
up the universe: earth, water, fire, and air. Most chose to create
installations from organic materials; others employed manufactured
materials
and shaped them to resemble real-world artifacts. Still others went
their own
way, though nobody went so far as to suggest a fifth element.
The first two works you meet, Susan
Child & Chris Alonso’s A Transect
and Christopher Ho & Daniel Bouthot’s Luncheon on the Grass (a
tribute to Édouard Manet’s great, subversive Le
déjeuner sur l’herbe),
prove a weak sendoff. Ho and Bouthot shaved a small grass area into a
grid of
higher and lower squares. Child and Alonso simply laid down a line of
lime in
the woods of a height and thickness we associate with baseball
diamonds.
Neither looks like much of anything.
A few feet away, however, Danielle
Krcmar’s Favorite Things: An Indirect
Portrait engages. Attached to strings hanging from the low-lying
branches
of a spreading tree are scaled-down versions of dozens of commonplace
objects —
pillows, sandals, chairs, a vacuum cleaner, a trowel, a cell phone, an
iron, a
drill — all made of cement. They move in the wind as if they were
living, but
in their color and their hardness, they resemble the unmoving
tombstones
nearby. It’s a shy, masterful creation, mysterious and evocative, the
stuff of
everyday life made to look as if it had risen up from the surrounding
graves.
When you’re following a charted
itinerary with map in hand, as I was the day
I visited, the element of surprise gets eliminated. I found myself
wondering
whether Larissa Brown’s half-dozen crude brooms — arranged at the base
of trees
so that they initially appear as fallen branches — might not have
registered
with greater charm and delicacy had I not been alerted to them
beforehand.
No such thoughts troubled my
pilgrimage when I came upon the exhibit’s fifth
contribution, Amy Stacey Curtis’s Inversion I, which involves a
scattering of circular mirrors the size of a vinyl LP on the floor of a
pine
grove. Had Curtis made a greater effort to integrate her mirrors with
the bed
of pine needles or with the trunks of the surrounding trees (what if
the
mirrors had grown gradually more visible on the forest floor instead of
all
being uniformly exposed? what if fragments of mirrors had been embedded
into
the trees’ bark?), she might have avoided the look of spillage from a
delivery
truck.
The next three installations were
sensitively and fully realized, small
miracles each, like sightings of rare migratory birds. Stacy Latt
Savage’s Fissure
looks like what you might see at an archæological dig. Her
flat-topped,
irregularly shaped concrete formations resemble the exposed vertebrae
of a
dinosaur or a leviathan, jostled from one another but proximate, like a
skeleton discovered on a river bed. Nearby, at a height just above Fissure,
a stone wall acts as a complement and a corrective, as if it were the
model for
Savage’s piece, an emblem not only of beauty but of purpose.
Jeanne Drevas’s Earth, the
Spiral is an immense snake made out of
pine needles and bird netting whose headless torso curls up at the base
of a
tree and whose tail unfurls down the slope of a small hill. Drevas
succeeds at
all kinds of balancing acts: the work threatens and consoles (it’s as
much
pillow as serpent); it’s both still and in motion, like a huge creature
asleep;
and it’s simultaneously one with the land and utterly manufactured —
she’s made
pine needles act like magnetized filaments or coiffed hair. Monstrous
and
refined, Earth, the Spiral is site-specific art at its finest,
inviting
us to appreciate with new eyes the spectacle of all design, the
deliberately
wrought and the naturally occurring.
Too bad Frank Vasello’s Lethe,
a seemingly cascading river of sticks
that for all their stillness appear to be coursing down a nearby
rock-covered
hill, is situated so close to Spiral. Both installations draw
on similar
properties of movement, material, and shape, so that the drama that
ought to be
Lethe is attenuated. Nevertheless, the work, whose name refers
to the
river in Greek mythology that ran through Hades and induced
forgetfulness in
those who drank from it, is a commanding presence, at once tumultuous
and
contemplative.
Other highlights include Kathleen
Driscoll's Column One: Falling Water, which looks like a frozen
waterfall, and Kaki Martin's Breathe, which is made up of five
manicured plots of growing rosemary in the shape of five contiguous
coffins. "The 4 Elements" ends with Mark Winetrout presenting an
arry of objects--elm seeds, bird feathers, tiny daguerreotypes, a gold
ring, a hornet's nest--in a formal display case, the type you see at
the entrance to libraries. Like Danielle Krcmar, Winetrout
achieves his poignancy by indirection: as hard and real as they are,
the objects of Xuanxue become metaphors of lost lives.
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