In show, controlled chaos

17 artists collaborate in RISD 'Collision'

November 14, 2010|Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent

PROVIDENCE — “Collision,’’ a collaborative exhibit featuring the work of 17 artists, was only partway up at the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art early last week — it opened Friday — and it was already living up to its name.

Lucky DeBellevue had placed a small, blue wall sculpture on top of Jeffrey Gibson’s installation of black-and-white prints, which covers an entire wall around a balcony overlooking the gallery. Franklin Evans had hung a curtain of floor-length tape, festooning the balcony and improbably adorning Gibson’s prints. Across the space, Marilyn Minter’s “Green Pink Caviar,’’ a video projection of a tongue licking bright candy, cut high across a corner and fell over Jackie Saccoccio’s calligraphic wall drawing. Its light bounced off Susan Jennings’s shiny, crystalline “Flow(ers),’’ suspended from the ceiling, which set reflective dots whirling through the space.

In “Collision,’’ art works, and artists, collide. The artists are inspired by one another’s pieces, and sometimes layer their own right on top. It’s improvisational. And the museum rolls with it.

“The installation people want to know how big something is,’’ said Judith Tannenbaum, the RISD museum’s curator of contemporary art. “But a lot changes. The Susan Jennings piece: On the checklist, it was one hanging sculpture.’’

Now it’s several. “I didn’t have a clue about that,’’ said Tannenbaum.

DeBellevue was up from New York, working with the installation crew and artist-organizer Saccoccio to install his untitled three-panel net made of glittering pipe cleaners in the museum’s Lower Farago Gallery, the vaulting exhibition space that welcomes visitors who come in the Benefit Street entrance.

“It’s freeing to work this way,’’ DeBellevue said as he made sure his netted panels, strung up to fixtures on the high ceiling, were plumb. “There aren’t any rules. You can do something over other people’s work. You can do anything you want.’’

He’s done it before. DeBellevue was one of 15 artists involved in Saccoccio’s 2008 project “Blue Balls,’’ at the Art Production Fund’s APF LAB in New York. Tannenbaum saw it, and invited Saccoccio up to Providence. All 15 “Blue Balls’’ artists signed on for “Collision,’’ and Saccoccio brought in two more.

Even when she’s the only artist in the gallery, Saccoccio is orchestrating the fertile chaos of “Collision,’’ shooting photos of the space with her phone, sending them to artists who can’t make it to Providence but are directing their contribution from afar, and implementing their plans.

READER COMMENTS »

View reader comments » Comment on this story »