Walking from the Broadway T stop to the Allston Skirt Gallery makes one realize the lengths that people go for art. The experience of that walk is completely unlike the environment at Tufts; it's a landscape of bridges, overpasses, metal railings, construction, tractors and dumpsters. Amid the chaos of the oft-forgotten industrial side of Boston, nestled in between warehouses, is a street with a few choice galleries, antique stores and porcelain showrooms. Among them is Allston Skirt.
The gallery currently has two separate exhibitions on view called "Anonymous: Suara Welitoff" and "A Mountain Moving a Monument: Brion Nuda Rosch." The former is a series of short 10- to 15-second military-inspired video pieces, while the latter is a varied-medium installation brought together by the common theme of man and his role in nature.
The first piece on view is Welitoff's "Untitled" from the "Anonymous" series. At first, it is difficult to distinguish the forms and what is actually occurring on the screen. The video runs in a continuous loop, making it difficult to tell when the film starts and ends, but after a few viewings, one starts to make sense of the images. Though Welitoff's films are meant to be ambiguous in their subject matter, after a short while, it becomes clear that her work concentrates on militarism, war and violence. In "Untitled," a man is dragging what is presumably a dead or severely wounded body from one side of the screen to the other.
The other two works, titled "Untitled (Blue)" and "Untitled (Red)" - unlike "Untitled," which is shot in color - are shown in two tones: white/blue and white/red. The people and objects in the frame are seen only by way of their shadows, which are depicted using the two primary colors (think of a photo negative, except with a color instead of black). The colors not only create another type of distortion, but they're also suggestive of the subject matter. "Untitled (Red)" shows the violent force of a police brigade beating down a crowd of civilians, while "Untitled (Blue)" concentrates on a procession of police officers (in what most likely are blue uniforms).
All three of her works function well together, making the artist's vision clearer with each successive viewing. The various distortions in the film - including a sort of time-lapse photo effect, a slow zoom and blurred figures - force the viewer to take a closer look at what is going on in each segment. "Anonymous" cleverly achieves anonymity in that the viewer cannot distinguish a time, place or even an individual, making it relate to any type of audience at any point in time. Welitoff manages to create the tone of traumatic experience by forcing her viewer to "relive" each moment until it becomes ingrained in her audience's memory.
Allston Skirt's second show, held in what the gallery director calls the "Mini Skirt," is by young San Francisco-based artist Brion Nuda Rosch. Rosch works in a variety of media, combining collage, painting and sculpture under the title "A Mountain Moving a Monument." He examines the role of man in nature by superimposing his own works of abstracted landscapes onto photographs found in books featuring the same subject matter. His pieces are often tongue-in-cheek, such as his group of sculptures entitled "Somewhat Significant Cultural Artifacts Purchased at the 99-Cent Store," which are objects he painted with rejected dump stock-house paint, including a kitsch horse bust and a Chinese mythological lion like the ones often sold in Chinatown.
Though at first the works seem disconnected, after spending some time looking at them, it becomes clear that they all push the limits of what is "monumental" in our manmade world. The idea of the permanence of mountains, and of nature as a broader concept, is juxtaposed with objects we consider to be insignificant and ephemeral, such as scrap pieces of wood and dollar-store trinkets. Through use of these various media, Rosch makes this point clear by encouraging the viewer to question his or her presence among such overwhelming natural architecture. Because these pieces work so intimately together, it would be a shame to see some of them sold.
"Anonymous: Suara Welitoff" and "A Mountain Moving a Monument: Brion Nuda Rosch"
At Allston Skirt Gallery, through March 2965 Thayer Street617-482-3652
