{"id":52,"date":"2010-02-12T15:00:30","date_gmt":"2010-02-12T22:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/?p=52"},"modified":"2010-02-18T14:37:44","modified_gmt":"2010-02-18T21:37:44","slug":"tufts-university-art-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/2010\/02\/tufts-university-art-gallery\/","title":{"rendered":"Tufts University Art Gallery"},"content":{"rendered":"

Exposure\/Aftermath Workshop: Aymer, India (Rajasthan)<\/p>\n

Questions Without Answers: A Photographic Prism of World Events, 1985-2010 (runs 1\/21\/2010 – 4\/4\/2010)<\/p>\n

Saya Woolfalk, The Institute for the Analysis of Empathy (runs 1\/21\/2010 – 4\/4\/2010)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Politically and topically inspired photography can easily rush to a place where the eyes become overwrought and don’t see with the sensitivity that the subjects merit. Good topical photography can be coherent and persuasive, but great topical photography somehow goes beyond that and induces a penetration of the image despite the viewer’s inclination to classify and dispense with it. How does an image consolidate and capture the mood of a situation while not allowing the viewer to be closed down to it because of familiarity and overexposure? This is the challenge of any kind of art, but with photography’s proximity to the forms of things, it poses a particular challenge.<\/p>\n

Two exhibits of photographs at Tufts include works which do rise to this occasion.<\/p>\n

Exposure\/Aftermath Workshop: Aymer, India (Rajasthan)<\/em> is an exhibition of student photographs done in the context of the Tufts Institute for Global Leadership’s “student led program for photography, documentary studies and human rights.” Elizabeth Herman’s The Last Village<\/em> includes several compelling images which make vivid use of compositional balances and color. The images of a boy playing on a railway construction site, a boy at home in front of a Ganesh icon, two old women’s hennaed and wrinkled hands, a girl standing inside a blue door, a girl in a yellow shirt climbing on the roof of a house, and even a totally blurred image of a girl dancing at a Shiva celebration, manage, in each case to articulate form and color coherently and directly, making each of these anthropological studies penetrating. Also of note are Brittany Sloan’s Zal Gulab: The Rose of Aymer<\/em> which depicts vivid scenes in a flower shop, and Jessica Bidgood’s Outsiders<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Questions Without Answers: A Photographic Prism of World Events, 1985-2010<\/em>, sponsored by the Tufts Institute for Global Leadership<\/em> and the VII Photo Agency <\/em>brings together a large number of topical pieces – many of overwhelming and tragic content – by a variety of different photographers.<\/p>\n

John Stanmeyer’s work, in several instances, is particularly compelling. An image of a human bone in a graveyard in Hunan, China (2003)<\/em> simply and directly evokes a singularity of response to the AIDS epidemic there. Two other Stanmeyer images from Sumatra, Indonesia (2005)<\/em> depict a body on a freestanding pyre and a lone standing home, both evidence of the ravages of the pan-Asiatic tsunami, and are, in their simplicity and directness, quietly evocative. The singularity of artistic focus amid the scenes of devastation provides a quiet, though disturbing, coherence in both cases.<\/p>\n

Several pieces by Christopher Morris – of varying content – provide ironic tones that speak eloquently. A photo of George W. Bush (2004) <\/em>entering the Oval Office in a cowboy hat, is suggestively and quietly humorous. A very different image from Pyongyang, North Korea (2005), shows a Leni Riefenstahl-type military array (her film, The Triumph of the Will,<\/em> depicts arrays of Nazis) of North Korean soldiers marching against the ravaging grain of enlarged, violent, reddened soldiers in a poster splayed above. It is transfixing and rhythmically disturbing. A triple portrait in Texas (2004)<\/em>, shows Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld in what appear now as perfect cameos of their certitude and assurance, quietly shadowed by the ironies of incomprehension – which leads to a study of repressed unconscious self-doubt.<\/p>\n

In a totally different vein, Saya Woolfalk’s The Institute for the Analysis of Empathy<\/em> is a fanciful exhibit of films, animations and cloth sculptures which, with its irony and satire – a goof on the notion of emotional archeology – is a pleasant and colorful offset to the other rather weighty photographic exhibits. The poop sheet on the “Institute” is a wonderfully playful ribbing of many self-consciously serious artistic statements and is totally refreshing. The sculptures, in particular, are vividly appealing and seem almost like three dimensional versions of Archimboldo’s (16th century, Italian) playful portraits in fruit.<\/p>\n

– BADMan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Exposure\/Aftermath Workshop: Aymer, India (Rajasthan) Questions Without Answers: A Photographic Prism of World Events, 1985-2010 (runs 1\/21\/2010 – 4\/4\/2010) Saya Woolfalk, The Institute for the Analysis of Empathy (runs 1\/21\/2010 – 4\/4\/2010) Politically and topically inspired photography can easily rush to a place where the eyes become overwrought and don’t see with the sensitivity that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[10,37],"class_list":{"0":"post-52","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-museums","7":"tag-add-new-tag","8":"tag-museums","9":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions\/109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}