Your School. Your Paper. Since 1936.

The Suffolk Journal

Your School. Your Paper. Since 1936.

The Suffolk Journal

Your School. Your Paper. Since 1936.

The Suffolk Journal

MFA sparks conversation in new exhibit

By Maria Baluch

The Museum of Fine Arts’ newest exhibition “Conversation Piece” invites interactions by displaying contemporary works that serve as platforms for dialogue. The MFA says that by taking everyday objects, such as a curtain, a TV, table, or chairs, as a starting point for conversation, these works take away innovations from the ordinary and disrupt viewers’ expectations of what they would find in a museum.

The exhibit features just a few collections. One is a piece called “Curtains (Vidas perfectas)” by Sarah Crowner and is a colorful curtain with an abstract mixture of white, pink, orange, black and green painted in a cubist manner on sewn linen and activated by dance. Mid-20th-century avant-garde artists whose work combined dance, theatre, fine arts, and design inspired Crowner, according to a statement on display adjacent to the piece.

She based this curtain on a 1956 theatre backdrop by Polish artist Maria Jarema, creating it from large pieces of fabric that she painted and then stitched together. This physical process brings the body into the work and further develops when it becomes a backdrop for performance.

Maria Baluch/Journal Staff

Performances for this display are held at the MFA every third Wednesday of the month until February. The curtain painting and design is in dialogue with dance, which is choreographed by Yury Yanowsky and performed by Boston Ballet dancers. The next performance will be held on Nov. 19 at 7 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.

One of the interesting additions to the exhibit is an iPhone app called “Somebody” by artist, filmmaker, and writer Miranda July. The way the app works is when you send your friend a message through the app, it doesn’t get delivered to your friend, but rather to “somebody” near them. After, this person acts as your stand-in and delivers the message to your friend verbally.

For July, the app represents “the antithesis of the utilitarian efficiency that tech promises, making us nervous, giddy, and alert to the people around us,” according to a statement on display in the gallery. It takes a device typically used for private communication to inspire dialogue. However, the piece itself is just an advertisement on the wall for this exhibit and doesn’t quite cause an interaction but rather is just a display. You can download the free app at Somebodyapp.com

The exhibition also includes a sculpture by Pedro Reyes titled “Colloquium,” which has interlocking panels that are cut in the shape of a blank speech bubble to scale with the human body. Reyes, who is a multidisciplinary artist trained as an architect, appeals from modernist furniture design, theatre, therapy and graphic arts. The sculpture is modeled after the classic Isamu Noguchi coffee table and is part of a series of works that serve as forums for conflict resolution.

Maria Baluch/Journal Staff

The chalk-like white color of the sculpture symbolizes the potential of peaceful dialogue to stimulate social change. Round-table discussions organized in collaboration with Harvard University’s Cultural Agents Initiative are held around this piece. The next discussion will be held Dec. 10 at 7:30 p.m. with Grant Kester, Professor of Art History and Director of the University Art Gallery at the University of California, San Diego.

There is also a black and white silent video called “Four-Legged Animals” by Maria Jose Arjona and color silent video called “Blue, Red, Yellow” by Jaime Davidovich. Arjona, who is trained as a dancer, performs in the soundless video with a chair and emphasizes the boundless relationship between the body and negative space surrounding us. With her dance movements, she shows the potential of that space and discovers new points of contact between her body and the chair.

As for Davidovich, his work combines video, performance, painting, and sculpture as he alters three television screens by “painting” them with blue, red, and yellow adhesive tape. His piece showcases the television as a physical object and a material for artwork, using it as a site for dialogue, rather than a one-way method of communication.

“Conversation Piece” is located in gallery 265 in the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art and is ongoing until March 15, 2015.

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MFA sparks conversation in new exhibit