Morgan Bulkeley is a humble genius. The Mount Washington, Massachusetts artist’s Nature Culture Clash—on view through February 4th at Berkshire Museum—presents a 50-year retrospective of his successful career in painting, drawing, and sculpture, as curated by longtime friend Geoffrey Young of Great Barrington. But when Bulkeley discusses the process of digitizing slides of old works to organize the massive show, he begins by self-deprecating about his limited faculty with computers.

Technology isn’t the sole source of tension in Bulkeley’s work, which among many things reflects the chaotic relationship between humanity and nature in a manner that’s often darkly humorous but never polemical. The aggressive encroachment of society on the natural beauty of the world has “been a startling event in his life,” largely due to its sheer contrast with the pastoral serenity of his childhood.

“It was practically like living in Noah’s ark as a kid. We had all kinds of wild animals around,” Bulkeley says of growing up with naturalist parents on a small farm, the same one where he lives today. He graduated from Yale in 1966, then spent the next year in Newark, New Jersey, where he worked with VISTA Programs. The summer of 1967 proved particularly troubling as he witnessed the Newark riots.

City with Past, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 in.

“People there were just kind of hopeless in a way. There were tanks driving down the street. It was like living in a warzone,” he says. “It was a real shock to me coming from my little woodsy background and moving into that kind of a scene, and it began to just be a theme for me.” He continued to see that theme of “growth of urbanism sneaking into nature” play out while living in Boston and Miami over the subsequent years.

Familiar and distorted pop culture iconography appears throughout Bulkeley’s art, and he alternates between paintings that are “tangled up and hard to travel through” and pieces with more navigable spaces, finding a certain relief in the transition. Switching between the meticulous detail of painting and the raw physical act of sculpture helps reenergize him in both forms. Throughout his work he aims to draw humor out of the often foolish behavior of his caricatured figures.

“I hang on to wanting to chuckle at things and look at people’s mistakes and be able to not damn them but laugh at them,” Bulkeley says.

Behind Spurr’s, 1971, gouache, 18 x 15 in.

He’s certainly observed turbulent times, but recent national and international trends give Bulkeley particular pause. “If you don’t listen to science, what are we doing?” he says, citing deregulation of toxic waste disposal and climate change among the more frightening current issues. His more recent work pulls both from these external disturbances and from the sadness of losing many close friends and family members in the last few years. “I do think there’s a little more desperation in the later works.”

Even when the work reaches its bleakest points, though, Bulkeley finds a way to laugh and keep looking up. “I’m certainly a hopeful person,” he says. “I’ve loved that balance between something horrific and something absurd or hilarious.”

Aim, 1984, oil on canvas, 60 x 78 in.

“My mother, when she could get up the stairs to my studio, used to come up. She never really got my work, but she would look at my paintings and say, ‘Oh, that’s really beautiful. Do you feel all right?’ I always kind of liked that response.”

Morgan Bulkeley–artist
Mount Washington, Massachusetts
Website

Top image: Moose in Town (cropped), 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 in. All images courtesy of the artist.

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Ross Normandin doesn’t believe in hell. He does find the concept amusing, as evidenced by his new exhibition at GRIN Gallery in Providence, Rhode Island. But Slabs and a Shell; a Hell has little to do with the fiery damnation realm seen in religious texts. The Waltham, Massachusetts-based artist jovially explains the title for this show of cast silicone rubber objects instead insinuates “that you’re entering GRIN and this is a certain hell. Everyone has their own idea of what that might mean for themselves. I think it’s a bit absurd.”

That absurdity is immediately apparent in the artworks, which Sarah Montross, associate curator of deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, calls “hermetic and comedic.” Pig, consisting of several molded wall-mounted rubber pig snouts and cords of identical design and varied colors, treads the line between painting and object. They provoke questions in the viewer by pushing a functional object (the mask) into a nonfunctional form, while inviting both amusement and discomfort.

“I’m interested in the playfulness of these art objects,” Normandin says. “People laugh at them and I wonder if they think it’s funny or if it’s just unsettling. I laugh when I’m uncomfortable. For me it’s impulse. So it’s interesting that people use that as a reaction to something they’re not quite comfortable with.”

Pig. Silicone and urethane rubber. 25 x 17 x 2 in. 2016. 

The at times bleak sense of humor within his art has demonstrable roots in Normandin’s own experience. His father and mother both died of cancer within eight months of each other, and Normandin says his father’s attitude “has a lot to do with how I make work,” recalling a sense of urgency in life. He fondly notes his father’s ability to make people laugh even in the throes of his illness. That comic persistence resonates with much of Normandin’s work. “I think there’s something interesting about comedy with tragedy, how things can be funny still and we can still laugh.”

“A lot of my work is about me,” Normandin says. “I don’t want to talk about myself, though.” Part of Slabs and a Shell; a Hell actively deemphasizes the artist through “Short Holiday,” a series of silicone rubber molds of his own face. “I don’t want to make all these objects and have people come in a gallery and say ‘Who’s this guy?’ It’s an exact cast of my face, and I made multiples, so at a certain point it’s generic, a generic face.”

Pig (detail). Silicone and urethane rubber. 25 x 17 x 2 in. 2016.

“No longer the question becomes who is this person; it becomes what’s the object, what’s the object do, how is it positioned? The face at that point doesn’t quite matter. That’s what I’m really interested in—to create things that are really grounded in who I am and what I’ve been through and continue to go through and how those things may connect to other people.”

Even while seeking those connections, Normandin avoids making art like a puzzle with a single answer or endpoint. “I don’t want to make work where the viewer eventually has a conclusion,” he says. “I prefer if a viewer sees my work and comes back to that work a year later and they feel completely different about it. I don’t want it to stay put.”

Ross Normandin
Waltham, Massachusetts
Website

Top image: Shell (video still). dimensions variable. 2017. All images courtesy of Ross Normandin and GRIN

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As a court interpreter, Gabriel Sosa is exposed to many narratives and situations he would not otherwise see. In graduate school at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, he decided to research and investigate these issues more incisively. Now, his career as a court interpreter and his career as an artist are intimately linked—both complementing and strengthening each other in powerful ways as he explores the importance of translation, testimony, memory, and social justice.

His latest exhibit, Please interrupt if you don’t understand, on display at A R E A Gallery in Cambridge through October 14th, confronts the use of language in the justice system, the overwhelming nature of the courtroom, and the fallibility of memory. Some of the exhibition’s larger drawings, for instance, use texts based on affidavits prepared by police officers in order to obtain search warrants.

“Due to the lengthy, often repetitive nature of these affidavits, I’ve often wondered how closely these texts are read in their entirety,” Sosa says. “I’m interested in the duality of that language; on the one hand, it’s essential because a warrant can’t be executed without that affidavit; on the other, if it’s glossed over, that language becomes disposable.”

Upon Further Questioning, 2017, charcoal and graphite on paper, 42 in. x 53 in.. Photo © Aníbal Martel

The exhibit also contains a series of drawings created with a typewriter and including fragments from court proceedings that Sosa has either observed or participated in. The drawings show how the typewriter epitomizes much about the justice system—it’s slow, mechanical, old-fashioned, and it only works in a certain way. It’s not malleable or flexible.

“I’m personally invested in this dialogue because I see up close how the justice system works, and in many cases, how it doesn’t work,” says Sosa. “Most people, especially in the art world, aren’t aware of how the court system works. I’m interested in creating awareness for the court system’s nuances, pitfalls, caveats, and opportunities for improvement.”

En dos ocasiones durante la primera quincena de abril, 2017, Graphite, oil, and chalk on paper, 30- x 44-© Aníbal Martel

In court, Sosa regularly hears multiple versions of the same event. For each  witness, their testimony becomes their truth, and as far as they’re concerned, the way they remember it is the way it happened. Sosa’s exhibition explores how memory transforms, and how despite the dilution of memories with the passage of time, people become more certain about the veracity of those memories.

“Words can lose meaning in different ways,” Sosa says. “These losses of significance become reflected in the drawings where texts become illegible—being layered, erased, and stacked one atop another. They become forgotten, tossed away, and recreated.”

While all of the documents Sosa uses in the exhibit are public, specific names have been eliminated as both a gesture of respect and as a subtle reminder that the situations, feelings, and experiences referred to in these works could happen to anyone, including ourselves.

Gabriel Sosa–artist
Somerville, Massachusetts
Website
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Top image: Le queda un minuto (detail), 2017, Graphite on paper. Photo courtesy of the artist.

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Geena Matuson is a force to be reckoned with. A storyteller, artist, multimedia director, and producer, she takes on just about any medium to express herself. Under the nom de plume The Girl Mirage, Matuson has woven a multifaceted storytelling universe through complex layers of photographs and neon color schemes, often focusing on her body as the source of conversation. Her work challenges the notion of beauty, performance, and self identity, and works to obscure the truth to “present the mirage of the form in which we are so familiar.”

On her website, Matuson proclaims “the illusion is real” under the candy-colored display of The Girl Mirage. In this antipodean play of identity, she challenges the viewer to examine her visual art as both a realm of dreamscapes and the possibility of the everyday. Her work speaks to the power of storytelling to elicit fantasy. It also examines femininity as both truth and performance, describing her own work as “ephemeral” and a space where “anything I can imagine about myself or my art can exist.”

Flower Daze, photo courtesy of Geena Matuson

Matuson graduated from MassArt in 2013 with a BFA in film/video, and has since been collaborating on a number of projects that include multiple digital photography series, such as The Girl Mirage and Flower Daze. She says that the kaleidoscopic texture of her work, tangled in colorful shadows, evokes a sense of synesthesia and humor. Other projects include her series of “fauxmercials” and a haunting black and white 16mm film, Cemetery Writer.

The Girl Mirage, Propaganda

Hidden within Matuson’s work is a playful sense of wonderment with the world around her, a keen eye for making the seemingly mundane seem mystical and vibrant. “I went into filmmaking because I wanted to be able to combine the ability to tell stories with making things that are visually accessible,” she says. “As a kid, I always wrote stories and for some reason I didn’t go to school for writing; I went for art.” Despite not getting along with any of her classmates (which she jokingly blames on her Type A personality), Matuson graduated with honors and continues to use film and digital media as her primary source of creation.

The Girl Mirage, Lemon Head

Matuson resides in Medfield, Massachusetts, and sits on the board of trustees for the Medfield Memorial Public Library, helping to promote technology and media education. This summer she’s traveling to Israel where, as a recipient of the Masa Israel Grant, she has a teaching fellowship to teach English as a second language and continue to focus on her own work. “I feel so inspired to create all the time. I am interested in so many mediums,” she says, “and it just means that I can express myself continuously through art and language. It really means that I am never bored.”

Geena Matuson–multidisciplinary artist
Medfield, Massachusetts
Website
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Top image, Liar, Liar (Curtains on Fire), image courtesy of Geena Matuson

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