"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution, and a comparable sense of blissfulness -- wonder, too -- informed that era of visual revolution. It is the altogether splendid achievement of "Picture Show," which runs at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University through May 6, to grant us some glimmers of what that reinvention might have felt like.
The aim of this show of contemporary art is to re-create the enchantment viewers experienced when first encountering these visual marvels a century and more ago. The PRC gallery, curator Leslie K. Brown writes, has been made over into "a space somewhere between a cabinet of curiosity, carnival spectacle, and an early motion picture theatre." An even better analogy might be to the interior of one of Joseph Cornell's boxes. There's the same sense of sly magic and delicate otherworldliness.
Certainly, Erica von Schilgen's "mechanical collages," as she calls them, are close kin to Cornell's assemblages. That said, they are very much their own imaginative creations. "Mon Petit Espace " is an old printer's drawer inhabited by a gathering of dolls, each of whom moves when a hand crank is turned. In "Always, Just Beyond Reach, " a set of outstretched hands can never quite reach a set of pretty flowers. Futility has rarely been so sweetly appointed. It's as if Laura Ashley were hosting a garden party in honor of Tantalus and Zeno .
Olivia Robinson seeks in her work, as she memorably puts it, "an animated intimacy." "Imbalanced Ambivalence" is at once sculpture, video art, and serenade. A handsome wooden case contains within it a video screen. When the viewer turns a crank, the sound of an accordion is heard and scenes of a nurse putting her uniform on can be seen. (One of von Schilgen's works plays a rinky-tink rendition of "As Time Goes By ." "Picture Show" is a sonic treat, too.)
