Harriet Casdin-Silver: To Van Eyck and Bosch

Keira Kotler: Lumina

Bryan McFarlane: Love For Sale

September 8 — October 3 at Gallery NAGA

Launching its 33rd season, Gallery NAGA presents the work of three artists united in the perceptions that the profane is sacred, the ordinary is exalted, and glory inhabits even the debased. 

In one gallery a large “altarpiece” by the doyenne of holography Harriet Casdin-Silver (1925-2008) is flanked by a “choir” of photographs by the young artist Keira Kotler that abstract color and light to produce luminous fields.  In the other, Bryan McFarlane’s paintings suspend suggestive forms and free-floating images in whirling spaces that suggest that everything has been pulled loose from its bases into our present turmoil.

Harriet Casdin-Silver: To Van Eyck and Bosch, Keira Kotler: Lumina, and Bryan McFarlane: Love For Sale are on exhibition from September 8 through October 3.  A reception for the artists and the public will be held at the gallery on Friday, September 11 from 6 to 8 pm.

Harriet Casdin-Silver’s To Van Eyck and Bosch is being shown in a gallery for the first time. It has been exhibited previously at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 1994 (Boston (in Dialogue) Now), The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in 1998-99 (Harriet Casdin-Silver: The Art of Holography), and the Bates College Museum of Art in 2005 (The Body Holographic: Harriet Casdin-Silver).  Writing in the catalog of Casdin-Silver’s DeCordova retrospective, curator Nick Capasso insightfully considered the sources of this work and its radical implications:

To Van Eyck and Bosch (1994) also deals with gender issues, but from a cultural and historical perspective. The title of this installation pays homage to the art historical masterpieces of the late Middle Ages that Casdin-Silver saw while in Belgium: the Ghent Altarpiece (1432), Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s magisterial painting of the Christian cosmology; and Hieronymous Bosch’s lurid and moralistic eschatological altarpieces, replete with monsters, bizarre fornications, and the fires of Hell (c. 1500). Like the Ghent Altarpiece, To Van Eyck and Bosch is flanked by the nude figures of Adam and Eve, and its central image, a tower of holographic hindquarters, is a direct reference to the anal imagery which runs through Bosch’s horrific landscapes. Adam and Eve, though, are not the Judeo-Christian progenitors described in Sunday school. The artist, through the use of collage, interchanged their midsections, and hence, genitalia. Adam and Eve are at once curiously degendered and sexualized. Through a deft selection and recombination of body parts, direct references to art and theology, and the multivalent aspects of holography, Casdin-Silver crashes through thousands of years of patriarchal belief to raise questions about religion, gender and gender roles, normative sexuality, art history, and the relationship between the body and the souls.

Keira Kotler grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts and graduated from Columbia before moving west at the end of the 1990s and settling in the Bay Area.  Her paintings and photographs have been shown widely in California and in Santa Fe and New York.  The NAGA show is her first in New England.

“I am drawn to the beauty of color and to the arresting purity it possesses when separated from form and context,” Kotler has written about her photographs, which are shot outdoors, but whose subjects are entirely unrecognizable.  “I’m out in the world seeing color, having an experience around it,” she said recently, “and my work is more about that experience than about the object itself.  Associations with the object can take away from the experience.”  What may have been the back of a sweatshirt or a construction cone, shot full frame and printed straight color, becomes, when presented to us out of focus, simply color and light playing through space.

Jamaican-born Bryan McFarlane conducts a Boston-based career that continues to expand internationally.  In 2008 solo shows of his paintings were mounted in Berlin and in Beijing, and he was among artists representing twenty-five countries in Beijing’s 2008 Olympics exhibition.

His recent work has developed in the variety of images he floats in painterly space, and the space itself is increasingly complex in color and shape.  We asked him about this:

Q: How does the new series seem different to you?

A: Working in Beijing, looking at the nature of the society, looking at human values and materialism, with so much stuff and so many people.  I’m working from more of an emotional and intuitive source rooted in real experience of places I’ve been – Beijing, Africa, the Caribbean, the United States.  I’m working with all of those contradictory situations that are simultaneously taking place, trying to distill them into some sort of emotion that can become abstract.  I’m not trying to narrate any kind of specific message, moral or immoral.  I’m just reflecting something of materialism in our age.

Q: Why are we calling the show Love For Sale?

A: Because nothing is pure.  Everything in our times has been commodified, the internet encourages a negotiation of give and take, and currency is used to solidify that, and that is translated into behavior and human emotion.  Even those who moralized about what is pure find themselves in a situation where they have to purchase everything