I was in transit today and got to spend a few hours at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. It’s a rather small museum; there were really only two exhibits and then the collection. Overall, though, I enjoyed it and was especially struck by a few of the works.
There is an exhibit of a Los Angeles-based artist named Charles LeDray. Especially interesting to me was his installation of a thrift store in miniature, all the way down to the dirty and depressing fluorescent lighting and the racks of clothes. It really made some aspects of our consumerism seem quite tawdry and poor in many ways, an idea that was echoed in other works. (picture of thrift store on desktop). Le Dray makes the clothes himself; in another room in the exhibit, he has plenty of pieces shown individually. There’s a gas jockey’s outfit, men’s suits, and other outfits and pieces. He also makes small hats, small pieces of furniture, and small pieces of pottery. Most of these did not do much for me, but I really found the small thrift store quite eerie and thought-provoking.
The other exhibit is of a Mexican artist named Dr. Lakra. He uses found pieces and draws on them. He is also a tattoo artist and many of the works are pictures of beautiful women which he finds at thrift stores and marks up with tattoos. It was amusing and interesting at first, but gradually grew repetitive to me.
In the permanent collection, there were several pieces that I really liked. The first was Ivan Navarro’s 11 Upside Down, a sculpture in wood. The work is in two boxes, about coffee table height. Within the glass-topped box are four descending lines of lights, the kind of lights that ring a mirror in a dressing room backstage at a theatre. At the bottom of the boxes is a mirror. This gives the sensation of looking down a mineshaft. I kept stepping back to look at the outside of the box, somewhat surprised that it wasn’t evident from the outside how far it plunged through the building. It was slightly frightening, a bit amusing, and really made me think about the creation of space in a sculpture and in perceptions. Obviously, the boxes contained occupied two square feet, but they also contained a seemingly infinite amount of space within them.
The other piece was “Czech Modernism Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely” by Josiah McElheny. It was a really interesting piece. There was also, in the mediatheque, a video of different artists explaining their works (Listen to mp3 here). He discuss the idea of capitalism in this piece. The idea that things are valuable because of their individuality, but at the same time, capitalism tells us that we can all accrue all goods with wealth, which is available to all. So here we have idividual and valuable things reduced, symbolically at least, to worthlessness through the very system that informs their value. Another thing I found intriguing is that, while I was looking at the piece, I realized that something was missing. I think the box is mirrored on all sides, and all the objects within it are, too. And all the objects are reflecting their own reflections. There is no reflection of the observer, though, which I found eerie. Here are these objects which only have value in the eyes of the observer and there doesn’t seem to be an observer. Or there is only a disembodied observer, me, looking at these pieces of metal which are fully unapproachable, because they are behind glass and they are seemingly in their own world where I don’t even appear.
Then I went to get a lobster roll. That was nice, too.
**Update–
Recent article at the Big Think on LeDray.
