Evan J. Garza on the 2010 DeCordova Biennial

BOSTON -The proverbial ice is melting in Boston, where the spring gallery season is starting to heat up. Things are even hotter in the suburb of Lincoln, where the DeCordova Sculpture Park + Museum recently inaugurated The 2010 DeCordova Biennial, an exhibition of seventeen artists living and working in New England. Breathing new life into the museum’s recently stale DeCordova ‘Annual’, Assistant Curator and biennial mastermind Dina Deitsch has assembled a strong group of artists that beckons audiences back to the museum in droves. Featuring a veritable spectrum of media, highlights include: Archive, an installation of storage boxes in the museum’s library (each labeled with phrases like “Favorite Zingers & Come Backs” and “Clocks Made From Meat & Skin”) by Ward Shelley and Douglas Paulson; the richly wild and colorful paintings of Laurel Sparks and Christopher Mir; Otto Piene’s strobe-light induced inflatable flowers, which deflate, die, and inflate again in a near pitch black room; and the star of the show, Georgie Friedman’s Dark Swell, a giant wave barrel of fabric on which moving blue lines are projected, sweeping the entire room into it’s rolling vortex, which viewers can walk through.

Two artists featured in The DeCordova Biennial will enjoy their own solo exhibitions at commercial galleries in Boston simultaneously: William Pope L. and August Ventimiglia. Pope L., whose film and performance antagonized viewers right out of the screening room at the Biennial’s opening (to the delight of many), will mount “Color Isn’t Matter” at Samsøn in Boston’s South End, opening February 5. Using plaster models of Le Corbusier’s Carpenter building at Harvard, dunked in a tank of ink to make monoprints (among many other tricks here), Pope L.’s show is well poised to explore perceptions and uses of color. Furthering an examination of hue will be August Ventimiglia’s “Event Study”, opening February 11 at Judi Rotenberg. This will be the artist’s first exhibition to focus on black and white media, while his gestural drawings and sculptures at the DeCordova are made entirely of Yves Klein blue.

“Roni Horn aka Roni Horn,” the artist’s intensely comprehensive survey that originated at London’s Tate Modern and is jointly organized by its second stop, the Whitney Museum, will now find a home at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Opening February 19, the exhibition continues Horn’s exploration of identity, gender, and the malleable nature of memory through a series of photographs, sculptures, and materials like pure pigment, gold, and glass. Several works by the artist are exhibited in pairs, series, or feature multi-sided parts, qualities echoed across the city in “AMALGAM: The Inaugural BCA Artist Studios Project” at the Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts (guest curated by this author, in the interest of full disclosure). The exhibition features artists from the BCA’s Studio Building, whose work is made from several pieces, parts, or fragments. “Different Kind of Monster,” a second exhibition from the same pool of artists installed in the EXIT Room gallery, explores identity and the human condition through varied representations of animals and beasts. The project is the first in a new annual series of guest-curated exhibitions of studio artists.

In Cambridge, a new exhibition at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center holds gender firmly at its helm. Curated by Michael Rush and opening February 5, “Virtuoso Illusion: Cross-Dressing and the New Media Avant Garde,” explores the ways in which several artists, modern and contemporary alike, have used drag as a tool (no pun intended) in their art-making process. Artists include Charles Atlas, Matthew Barney, Marcel Duchmap, Kalup Linzy, Yasumasa Morimura, Ryan Trecartin, Andy Warhol and several others.