Montserrat College of Art Gallery · Beverly, MA
In Pursuit of Beauty brings together five artists who examine both the politics and poetics of the beautiful. They are: Julie Chang (San Francisco, CA), Timothy Horn (Melbourne, Australia), PIXNIT (Boston, MA), Tomás Rivas (Santiago, Chile), and Elizabeth Wallace (Boston, MA). This exhibition is inspired by the resurgence of visually sensual work. Unapologetically decorative, ornate, and concerned with elaborate surface detail, each artist explores beauty in their own way. They are exemplary of a generation of artists who have come into the 21st century art world with a renewed interest in beauty as a tool and a topic of investigation, making it an integral part of their artistic process. These artists utilize rich surface designs to draw the viewer to the work, only to surprise them with seditious content. Their pursuit differs from the classical understanding of beauty as perfectly proportioned and idealized by integrating imperfection rather than excluding it.
BEVERLY - "Since every age and every people have had their own form of beauty, we inevitably have ours," wrote Baudelaire. "In Pursuit of Beauty" at Montserrat College of Art Gallery delves into a recent fascination with elaborate surface detail and decoration - a word used dismissively by many art-world intellects during much of the 20th century.
The flourishes of Baroque and Rococo design and Victorian textiles celebrated opulence. Artists who deploy them today have more subversive ends in mind. Timothy Horn walks a line between attraction and repulsion (a theme common in contemporary art) in "Mutton Dressed as Lamb," an amber rubber sculpture cast in the form of a Chippendale-style mirror. It's fleshy and translucent, festooned with sconces. There's no reflection, but we know it's a mirror, and a monstrous one at that.
Julie Chang, the child of Chinese immigrants, grew up in Southern California in a home decorated with Baroque and Rococo patterns. Her installation "Design for a Well-Lived Life" features wallpaper scrolls with bright patterns taken from Chinese textiles, European wallpaper patterns, and contemporary graphic design. These rich, sometimes jarring accumulations of pattern are part of the artist's visual DNA.
The melting pot of cultural identities stirred up by immigration and particularly colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries has been a recent flash point in contemporary art. Here, Chilean artist Tomás Rivas appropriates neoclassical patterns that decorate the halls of power in Santiago and symbolize European colonial architecture. He carves them into construction drywall, which peels and crumbles, making designs associated with antiquity brilliantly ephemeral.
The Boston artist who calls herself Pixnit marries graffiti with signifiers of empire, using spray paint and stencils in her installation "Parlous" to echo blue, floral-patterned wallpaper used in Queen Victoria's bedroom. The gulf of this juxtaposition is too wide. I'd rather see street art playing against the art and design of 21st-century corporate boardrooms.
There's a sense of cultural excavation in Elizabeth Wallace's delicately layered works. In "Stasis," she references Victorian wallpapers and doilies, as well as urban aerial views of sites of conflict. All these revolve around a table, a hopeful symbol of coming together and sharing a meal.
These and other artists use ornamentation as a magnifying glass through which to examine society and self, and there's nothing new or radical about that. It's just another tool in the contemporary artist's kit."