Slivers of skewed spaces underlying structure

Galleries

June 15, 2011|By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent

Clockwise from left: Incident 415 by Mary Lum, An Unseen Enemy 00:02:19:15,… (CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: CARROLL…)

MARY LUM: Accidental Incident

At: Carroll and Sons, 450 Harrison Ave., through July 2. 617-482-2477, www.carrollandsons.net

KAY RUANE: Time Codes

At: Ellen Miller Gallery, 38 Newbury St., through June 30. 617-536-4650, www.ellenmillergallery.com

CARRIE MCGEE: Mixed Media Constructions

At: Lanoue Fine Art, 125 Newbury St., through July 5. 617-262-4400, www.lanouefineart.com

Urban space collapses in Mary Lum’s mind-bending works on view at Carroll and Sons. In paintings, collages, and photos that spring from a DNA cocktail that includes Stan Lee, Robert Rauschenberg, and Albert Einstein, Lum has taken over the gallery, commanding the viewer’s attention in ways large and small.

Let’s start with the small. She brings intimacy to a series of 14 pieces, each less than a foot wide, one abutting the next. They lead you around a corner; even as you’re pulled into each work, you’re conscious of the architecture around you. Some are simple photos, such as “Paris Incident 1102,’’ which depicts a portion of sidewalk where the adjoining wall shifts from brown to black-tiled under sky blue. Look, Lum seems to be saying. Things change.

“Incident 4,’’ in the same group, foils expectations with a series of fragments that arc back in folds, creating the illusion of depth. There’s a sliver of a photo of gravel; a sliced-up comic, now blue mesh; passages of paint, and a photo of a hallway that leads us even deeper. Lum extends a pipe running down the hallway floor out into the empty foreground with another slice of comic book.

She jumps scales in “Incident 51611’’ by highlighting a gallery support beam in warm yellow, which crosses the ceiling and drops down the wall to the floor, making a portal. Mirrors placed on the floor on either side suggest that the yellow drops below floor level, onward forever. Space is not what you think it is in Lum’s world.

For “Incident 415,’’ a mixed-media work on paper, Lum uses just the edges of panels from comic books (which she blows up and copies) to build an unwieldy, skeletal structure against a ground of blue over poison green. Look closely, and you’ll see a pink knee, a blue arm, a rumpled head along the swiveling structure, which looks like an edifice, or a twisted city map.

She uses everything in her toolkit to open space up, or to add more thrust to skyscrapers, but in so doing her cityscapes also flatten, skew, and topple. These works reference architecture, but with their convolutions and contractions, they convey something less orderly, something monstrous and beautiful, something more than the city’s structure: its life.

Images distilled

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