Art Basil

January 12 – 27, 2018

Opening Reception and Artist Talks: Thursday, January 18, 6-9pm

Atlantic Works Gallery has a history of staging offbeat group shows to satisfy the personalities and talents of our eclectic artist members…

…so, this past summer, when one of our members climbed up a ladder to get basil from his rooftop garden only to fall off the ladder and bust his face up but good, we joked that the portrait he took of himself after returning from the hospital should be titled Art Basil.  

And then it hit us–our first 2018 group show must be Art Basil! What better way to play off the whole ART BASEL thing and its attendant hoopla and, at the same time, challenge ourselves to create amazing new work for the new year.

Another of our extraordinary members had the idea for an Art Basil cookbook that showcases AWG art and basil recipes, which we promptly got to work on.  

Now you have it in your hand: the ART BASIL cookbook. And we’re inviting you to come see the exciting ART BASIL show.  (You can check out the remarkable transformation happening on the East Boston Waterfront, too, in which AWG is prime art player.)

FOR MORE INFO, or to request another Art Basil cookbook, or a private viewing*, contact Anna Salmeron at annasalmeron@comcast.net or 617.913.1871, or Christine Palamidessi at christine@palamidessi.com or 617.460.0550.

Gallery hours: Fridays and Saturdays 2-6pm, or by appointment*

The German Christmas markets sparkle in the European landscape as places where reality can be suspended and grown-ups can be kids again. Central Berlin alone has 10 Christmas markets, each market with its own personality. They run from late November to early January.

There are constants: Twinkling rows of small shops bring crafts and specialty street-foods from all over the country. Sausages sizzle. Beer foams. Wonderful smells waft. Gingerbread morphs into festive shapes. Some markets even have ice-skating rinks, amusement-park rides, and carnival games of chance.

Drinks are plentiful, the Glühwein (hot mulled wine) and hot rum grog are most popular because it is cold outside, and most drinking places are outdoors, around circular fire pits or at long tables. My modus operandi is strolling among crowds with a mug of Glühwein or a package of hot roasted chestnuts, or sitting at a fire pit.

My favorite market is at Alexanderplatz, where there is a giant Pyramide with life-size Mary, Baby J, Joseph, shepards, and kings revolving on a 5-story-tall replica of a common German Christmas table-top decoration, which at home has tiny tiers propelled by candle heat. The ground level of Berlin’s monstrous Pyramide is a beer garden, the second tier is a restaurant.

The Berlin Christmas markets are kitschy and crass, but within bounds. The mood seems a mix of merriment and nostalgia. Little kids are ecstatic with all the lights and movement, and adults are ready to drift into a realm of holidays long past with hope for the future. This is maybe why the killings at last year’s Berlin Christmas market seemed especially brutal. Its one-year day of remembrance happened this week in Berlin, and the observance was not without controversy.

When the attacker last year on Dec. 19th drove a 25-ton truck into the Christmas Market at Breitscheidplatz quickly killing 12 people and injuring 70 more, prime minister Angela Merkel herself seemed like a doe caught in the headlights.

She was blamed for the terror by the right wing for having allowed so many immigrants into the country (the driver of the truck was from Tunisia), and she was criticized from the left wing for showing so little compassion toward the victims and their families. She did not meet with the families after the attack. She did not write them personal letters. She did not offer government-funded reparation or funeral costs.

It’s not like terror is unknown in Germany. The 20^th century Germans unleashed much of their own on the world. But since the 1972 terror attack at the Olympic Games in Munich, which now seems long ago, modern Germany has gotten off easier than many other countries in terms of this sort of violence. Frankly, Merkel has had little practice in dealing with terrorism on her own turf.

On Tuesday of this week, Merkel visited the site of the killings, where an elegant and unusual monument to the victims was unveiled (see next blog entry on artistic monuments to terror) and where fresh flowers and candles have been constant since a year ago. The Christmas market was shut down that day for the ceremonies. Bells tolled in the Gedächtniskirche – the Church of Rembrance of WW II events, on the steps of which the truck driver had mowed down the 12 victims. On Wednesday, Merkel finally met with the families of the killed and the injured, and talked with them for 3 hours. Overdue, but kind.

In the past Germans have been critical of the way some nations report terrorist events – nations that name and lionize the perpetrators, and leave the victims nameless. In response to this act of terror, German journalists have made a point of naming all 12 victims in each coverage of the event. I will do it, too: Anna Bagratuni, Georgiy Bagratuni, Sebastian Berlin, Nad’a Cizmár, Dalia Elyakim, Christoph Herrlich, Klaus Jacob, Angelika Klösters, Dorit Krebs, Fabrizia Di Lorenzo, Lukasz Urban, Peter Völker.

Three-foot high, one-ton sections of concrete barrier now encircle the same market and life goes on in a bent direction.

May our celebration of the new season, the new year, in any holiday form we choose, signify a fresh start for us all.

X Bonnie Woods

In the gallery with Charlene Liska, 2017

In the Silent. Silence. Silenced. exhibit at Atlantic Works Gallery, Charlene Liska sets up a Plato’s Cave, of sorts, using video and installation. Gallery visitors can see faces of the artist’s  tribe on one screen and hear the echos of what they are saying–via  deliberate use of headphone assistance– on a second screen in a different location in the gallery. At the same time the sound of silence–rather, what Liska offers as silence–is a bird’s chirping which permeates the gallery’s audio atmosphere. What the gallery-goer does not immediately realize: the bird chirping is mimicry of the real thing; a sound made by Liska’s Brazilian electrician, Elson.

Using the concept of Silence as the springboard, Liska plays with the possibilities of form and organization, flat planes, shadows, dimension and her own wit, imagination and experience.

“I see Silence as having two sides,” she says. “There’s the beautiful, spiritual and eternal. We are all seeking that and desperately want that kind of silence. And then there is the psychological side.

“Psychologically we’re all being silenced by too much noise. Too much data. It’s flooding in on us constantly.”

Artist Charlene Liska and her ‘Diorama’ installation at Silent. Silence. Silenced exhibit November 2107.

The far-side of the gallery houses her curtained-off installation Diorama. Liska creates a layered and a sculptural space that features her own image–talking but without sound–captured within a very small 3-d TV that hangs about six feet above the floor. A projection of a green shrub and brick wall hit and flash on the monitor. The green and red images reach back further, to the flat wall which is about 6 feet behind the suspended TV. The green flashes, changing shape, morphs.    In the upper left corner, is a video cameo of a Boreal Warbler that seemingly watches over the pulsing installation.

“I have tremendous sensitivity to flashing light,” Liska said. “I suffer seizures. Epilepsy.”

Liska explains that epilepsy was a cruel condition to have as a child because it made her feel alienated, self-vigliant and hypersensitive. “Beginning when I was about 13, going on through menopause–estrogen can push you over the edge!”

She hid the condition. In high school teachers and administrators threatened ‘if you have another one’ they would have to put her in an institution. “That meant insane asylum,” she adds. Her family felt strongly that she and they should not talk about her condition publicly.

“I don’t stay silent about it anymore, or hide it.” Liska explains. The episodes and experience certainly influenced her art.

For example, waking up from a seizure Liska would see heads hovering above her. “Heads similar to the heads in my video interviews.” Of course the heads were her husband’s and daughter’s; earlier on her family’s.

Liska has shot many ‘head-on interviews.’

“I did one on Occupy Boston. Another in Berlin on the Documenta. The first video I made was with Anna [Salmeron]. We interviewed gay people about their first kiss. It’s titled ‘Crush’.”

She laughs. “I’m attracted to people’s heads and what’s going on in there.”

In the Silent. Silence. Silenced video Prophecy I, Liska interviews and celebrates her tribe of Atlantic Works Gallery artists.  She requested the interviewees wear hoodies, a form of silencing, and asked them about the future.”What do you think it will be like?” But you can’t hear the answers, unless you walk to the other side of the gallery, to Prophecy II, and put on headphones, or read the text pinned to an opposite wall. Gallery-goers, however, can see the deconstructed pulse of the language, like a line of a heart monitor, that captures the sound waves of the interviewees answers. “It’s media chaos,” she says about the separation of voice from image. “It’s taken for granted in our world, words can easily be drowned and depersonalized in data.”

In the back nook of the gallery, Liska’s 12- hour video, Border Night  not only pays homage to the past–early video artist Andy Warhol– but also to current and future questions regarding privacy and surveillance.

“I wanted to grab the opportunity to make this video before everything on East Boston’s waterfront changes,” Liska says.  So, one night in  September 2017, Liska set up cameras in her Border Street studio window and shot a dusk to dawn look at East Boston’s waterfront.

In addition, at the Silent, Silence Silenced exhibit, Liska shows archival prints:  Newfoundland Bogs (from her time in Canada); Convent, Ghent; and Mojave Whistlestop.  

Atlantic Works Gallery artist Charlene Liska in front of “Prophecy I Machine Transcription”: video, 2017 (image on screen is Elson, the Bird Caller)

There is not complete Silence in the gallery. We hear bird noises. “So many people associate silence to birdcalls,” Liska says. So she came up with bird sounds–a witty twistaroonee, of course: sounds made by her Brazilian electrician who has a knack for imitating and relating to birds. “They talk to him. He talks to them,” she says.

“When you go into the countryside to record silence, you get birdcalls. Even when you are not looking for them, there they are.  It’s like birds live in a parallel universe. Their spirits fly and they don’t care what we do. They just go on and on. Unaffected.” She nods. “Birds are stronger than we are.”

Finally, going back to Platos Cave: the ‘prisoners’ in the cave perceived only shadows and echoes of real objects and were completely unaware that those forms were not the real thing. Ultimately, according to Plato, their perception was not false; by their understanding of the world, the shadows and echoes were the actual forms, since this was all they knew.

In ‘Liska’s Cave’, an ode to Silence, the world’s transition to a socially connected, digital society—the age of the internet–nudges the viewer to contemplate modern reality, and the shadows it casts on form. Here, in the gallery, the major form is video screens. And use of the form questions the separation of words from their speaker, the transformation of spoken text into paper flatness; the absence and ability to inject new words within the movement of a silenced mouth; and even the manipulation of self presentation.

In the gallery with Charlene Liska, 2017

“I do art because I like to do it,” Liska said. “I make art to make art, for no other reason.”

We can think of Liska as the bird in the corner of the gallery in Silent. Silence. Silenced. watching over the video screens. The sound of her voice  has cast strong shadows that challenge our questions about the future and what we might choose to make or take from the video screen.