In this year's exhibit, organized by the museum's curatorial team headed up by Rachel Rosenfield Lafo and Nick Capasso, many of the artists are too familiar. They may not have shown together before, but they come across as the same old crowd. Usually the DeCordova Annual presents New England as a thriving place for artists. A show that evokes an "oh, yeah, them again" response makes the region look like a small place for creative souls.
To be sure, I've seen almost all the dreamlike, realist paintings Matt Brackett has up here, and I still find them haunting. Light plays as strong a role as it does in theater, illuminating characters who grope mutely around in gorgeous South Shore settings. In them, Samuel Beckett meets Edward Hopper. In "Preparations at Dusk," a group mysteriously hoists a pallet holding boxes into a tree. "Cold Front" depicts a woman carrying an armful of oranges over crumpling marsh ice. Brackett sets many paintings at a home that was in his family for generations, a gold mine of memories and odd reveries. "Distant Waves" shows a man in a bedroom, holding an anchor and leaning toward a window. He seems pinned to the homestead and longing to flee.
In a perfect counterpoint across the gallery, Vanessa Tropeano's dark, surreal large-scale color photos strive to honor the mystery in family stories and secrets. Sealed envelopes, available for the viewer to take, explain some of the imagery, but sometimes the title is enough, as in "Two Boys Drowned," a shot of an icy pond in winter's dusk.
There are a few unexpected sparks in the show, such as Yana Payusova's droll, graphic, comic-book style paintings chronicling her childhood memories of Russia. In "Because It's How It's Done," she draws a harrowing and funny scene of adults haranguing a disaffected girl, all within one person's gaping mouth. Every figure crackles with edgy personality. "Match," a diptych, captures high drama at a ping-pong game, as a vividly drawn crowd of worried and fractious spectators watches a laconic, tattooed player take on a one-handed opponent.
