Gary Webb: Mr. Jeans is the British sculptor's first solo American museum exhibition. An exciting and established young contemporary sculptor in England, Webb is well-known for his use, often in a single artwork, of myriad materials including steel, aluminum, glass, mirror, plastic, brass, wood, brick, spray paint, fabrics, and assorted found objects. For Gary Webb: Mr. Jeans, deCordova will present a survey of Webb’s recent work including two new outdoor sculptures designed by the artist specifically for deCordova’s Museum Entrance Plaza.  Webb creates enigmatic objects that play games with the tradition of Modernist abstraction while commenting on twenty-first century consumer culture. The riot of materials he uses in his work is matched by his exuberant use of color and the compositional complexity of his sculptures, which walk a knife-edge between order and chaos. References to Modern Masters such as Joan Miró, Anthony Caro, and Donald Judd ricochet throughout Webb’s work, which is also informed by high-end furniture design, retail display, the vulgarity of mass-produced objects and advertising, and scads of bling. Overall, Webb’s sculptures are joyful, funny, playful, bizarre, and reflect a truly unrestrained creative imagination. The exhibition’s subtitle, “Mr. Jeans” reflects the artist’s somewhat surreal sensibility.

Platform 9: Jedediah Caesar:  Los Angeles-based artist Jedediah Caesar creates sculptures from amassed and congealed materials that speak to process, temporality, and location in contemporary art.  Filling containers with found objects from a specific site—a road trip through California, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, or his own studio—Caesar collects and recombines a variable grouping of natural and man-made refuse which he sets in resin and then slices. The result is a compression and reorganization of time and place into forms that flirt between the abstract and real, painting and sculpture, and old and new.  Caesar’s sculptural practice of collecting, condensing, and re-presenting found and often discarded materials becomes a post-industrial interpretation of geological processes. The thin slices of these object-laden bricks, akin to a geologic cross-section, resemble the intricate patterning of speckled marble and follow a similar logic of formation: compression, secretion, and metamorphism. Accordingly, his work is often inspired by the crystalline forms of geodes, the transformation of limestone into marble, and the visual layers of time exposed in each and every slice of rock. These natural, time-based processes find their sculptural translation in Caesar’s work in form and concept, as he reverse engineers their aggregate formation.

second nature: abstract photography then and now:  Abstract photography challenges our popular view of photography as an objective image of reality by reasserting its constructed nature. In Walter Benjamin’s essay on the history of photography, the philosopher and critical theorist articulates photography’s ‘second nature’ as its inherent ability to detach and abstract the visible from the real. Non-representational photography lives in this contested middle ground between material reality and photographic illusion—fact and fiction—first and second natures. Today, anyone who has a cell phone can take and send digital pictures instantaneously. In response to this snapshot culture, many artists are returning to the study of photography’s underlying properties to consciously construct an image of reality. Second nature looks at the contemporary embrace of the highly fabricated image as a return to an earlier time in photography’s history. As such, this exhibition takes up the subject of abstract photography through a temporal pairing—presenting the scientific and expressionistic experimentation of photography in the first half of the 20^th century from the Museum’s collection with current explorations of the medium. 

Jean Shin and Brian Ripel:  Collaborators Jean Shin and Brian Ripel are known for their large-scale installations that transform everyday objects into elegant expressions of identity and community.  At deCordova, Shin and Ripel will investigate the concept of social retreat through three site-specific installations. Inspired by local examples of Henry David Thoreau’s move to Walden Pond in 1845 and Julian deCordova’s retirement to Flint’s Pond in 1881, Retreat will explore the differing embodiments of escapism. While both Thoreau’s log cabin and deCordova’s castle share similarities in locale and siting, they symbolize radically different utopian visions of modern living. Drawing from Thoreau’s familial connection to the pencil industry and deCordova’s profession as a tea merchant, Shin and Ripel will reconstruct their physical and psychological havens with the materials that made each possible.

For more detailed descriptions of the exhibits, go to http://www.decordova.org/. 

Cost: $45 per person, NON-REFUNDABLE, includes bus trip, tip for driver, Museum entry fee, guided 45-minute gallery tour, box lunch & self-guided sculpture tour. Bus leaves Eastside Marketplace parking lot at 9:00 a.m. and returns by approximately 4:00 p.m. (Important to park on the outer most sides away from the building and the entrances.)  The docent led tour will begin at 10:30 a.m.

Reservations and payment are due no later than FRIDAY, JUNE 1st.  To make a reservation and purchase one or more tickets using MasterCard or VISA, use the form below or send a check payable to BCLIR (noting deCordova Trip) by mail with the attached reservation form.

ALL registrants MUST SIGN and return the waiver form by Friday, June 1st.

Questions or concerns, email bclir@yahoo.com, Attention: Nondas.