Two shows that recently opened at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art are keyed to our new normal: One came into being during the most restrictive moments of the pandemic; the other, though long planned, shifted its focus as these past, momentous months unfolded. Conceptually, both address the questions — personal and political — that are on many minds at the moment.
‘Close to You’
This exhibition is a balm after a year in which so many had to learn how to maintain connections with loved ones in new, unfamiliar ways. In the early months of the pandemic, Nolan Jimbo, a graduate student in art history at nearby Williams College, selected six artists of color, many of whom are queer, whose work reflects on bonds of kinship and family, and on ways that those bonds can be created and nurtured across distances of time and space. They are Laura Aguilar, Chloë Bass, Maren Hassinger, Eamon Ore-Giron, Clifford Prince King and Kang Seung Lee.
The video, prints and poster that make up Bass’s “#sky #nofilter ” (2016-17) poetically suggest that our shared experiences — among our families, our friends, our political comrades — may not in fact be as communal as we imagine. Using a series of images of the sky, shot with an iPhone camera, Bass points out that even the most basic of statements (“the sky is blue”) must be examined in the face of our deeply individual responses to the world.
Lee creates imaginary genealogies of queerness. In his video, “Garden” (2018), for example, he imagines a kinship between the Korean writer Joon-soo Oh and the English filmmaker Derek Jarman — two people who did not know each other but whose work is meaningful to Lee himself. Lee digs holes in Namsan Park, a gay cruising spot in Seoul that Oh frequented, and in Jarman’s garden in Kent; into each hole he drops half of a drawing, connecting the two on a subterranean level.
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