In one section of the Currier Museum of Art’s new exhibition, The Curious Magic of Varujan Boghosian, visitors are asked to solve visual puns created by the artist. The works are labeled tchotchkes, but Boghosian refers to them jokingly as “objects of my affliction,” a nod to fellow Surrealist artist Man Ray’s “Objects of My Affection” collages. From a cat in a boot (“Puss in Boots”) to a skull and paintbrush (“Brush with Death”), each piece captures Boghosian’s wry humor and acute observation of life, death, love, and literature.

Boghosian creates collages and sculptures out of found objects, using everything from children’s toys and artist’s palettes to paper cutouts and photographs. His seemingly random work, often an homage to friends and fellow artists, is strongly influenced by other Surrealists such as Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp as well as literature and poetry, especially Greek and Roman mythology. Curator Kurt Sundstrom, who assembled the Currier exhibition, calls Boghosian’s work unique objects open to multiple interpretations. Boghosian calls them constructions. No matter what they’re called, they invite observers to spend time with them. “I paint, but I’m not a great painter,” Boghosian says. “I do think I’ve added to the scheme of things with my constructions.”

Between Two Worlds

The son of Armenian immigrants, Boghosian was born in New Britain, Connecticut in 1926. After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he enrolled at Central Connecticut Teachers College on the GI Bill. In 1953, he received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Italy, then became a student of artist Josef Albers at the Yale School of Art and Architecture in Connecticut. He’s been a practicing artist and teacher ever since, exhibiting his works in the 1960s alongside artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Claes Oldenburg. For nearly 30 years, he was a professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, which is still his home.

At 91, Boghosian is more productive than ever. He considers the last two years among the most productive of his career as he continues to delve into collage and three-dimensional works. “I don’t know why,” he says, “but I couldn’t be more pleased with myself.” His collages have become simpler, he says; instead of using multiple objects in a work, he narrows it down to two or three.

Self Portrait as Lion

Boghosian once noted that foraging is “basic training for artists.” He still collects. A favorite pastime is morning coffee with several other Upper Valley artists, then heading out together to scour flea markets, antiques malls, and random yard sales for new material. “People ask if I have an idea of what I’m creating when I start collecting objects,” he says. “The material usually dictates what the images are going to be. I always say you should just keep your eyes open for it.”

The Boghosian retrospective at the Currier is comprehensive, featuring 60 works from the Currier, private collectors, and the artist himself. In one of the galleries, a quote on the wall by Boghosian neatly sums up his artistic philosophy: “I don’t make anything. I find everything.” Fortunately for us, he’s still looking.

Varujan Boghosian–artist
Hanover, New Hampshire
Website

Top image, Emperor of Ice Cream, photo courtesy of Varujan Boghosian

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Soo Sunny Park’s studio in Lebanon, New Hampshire, is a literal hive of activity. Along with her assistants, she is bending and snapping together the last pieces of BioLath, an installation piece which opens at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, on February 25th. The diamond-cut metal lath is being twisted into a series of organic, cloud-like shapes whose sensual curvature isn’t just an exercise in aesthetics. The edges of the mesh are sharp, the modular sections are intentionally transparent, and the finished work, unlike classic sculpture whose form is meant to viewed at a respectable distance, is built to be walked through, seen through, the completed installation physically fragmented by both the viewer’s perspective and the light that moves through it.

Soo Sunny Park, concept model for BioLath, installation at the Currier Museum, 2017 | photo courtesy the artist

Displacement, perception, and self-awareness are central themes that move through Park’s installation art. Park emigrated to the United States at age 11, and had already begun to grapple with the central questions that would later take physical form in her adult work. “I went through an existential crisis when I was six,” she says. “I began to wonder about existence and why I can’t see my own face, my own eyes, and why I always feel like I’m looking out from the inside. How others see me, the body, is not how I’m aware of it. Then you start to ask about consciousness. Is there life after this? You question if there’s a soul. I try to think about that kind of duality when making art, and what happens in the middle.”

Soo Sunny Park, concept drawing for BioLath (detail). Installation at the Currier Museum, 2017 | Photo courtesy the artist

Park, a graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, began her career as a painter. Struggling to understand the role of painting, she grew increasingly interested in sculpture, a form whose physical possibilities drew her attention. Debating the inherent differences between the two, Park took on a new project. “I poured paint on the floor and cut it to form a body,” she explains. “It was a clothing piece, but was it also a painting—or did I just create a sculpture? Now you’re inside the artwork. Now you see the world from inside of a painting, inside the sculpture. I tried to flip the kind of space that the viewer would experience so that they’re wearing the piece and looking out from a reverse perspective.”

Soo Sunny Park, Silver Linings, 2015 | Photo courtesy the artist

Park came to Hanover in 2005, having taken a professorship at Dartmouth College with the idea of making New England her home. As an installation artist used to a much more aggressive urban landscape, she was once again faced with issues of displacement. “I moved around a lot as a kid and was a bit afraid of being in a rural area. A lot of artists feel they have to be in New York, obligated to show up at certain events and see certain people. There’s not that kind of pressure here. It’s a different speed of life, and I feel focused. So being in a quieter place, especially as an installation artist, has been great.”

Soo Sunny Park | Photo by David Nielsen

Soo Sunny Park, sculptor
Lebanon, New Hampshire
Website
Twitter
Instagram

Top photo Unwoven Light, 2013 | Photo courtesy the artist

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The Museum plans to add, “…three object-study rooms, a sweeping public reception space, and a number of stunning new galleries, along with renovations to the existing Charles Moore galleries.” Hood Museum estimates the project will continue through 2018, culminating with a spectacular reopening gala in 2019, Dartmouth’s 250th anniversary.

Laetitia Soulier: The Fractal Architectures on view at Hood Downtown | Photo by Alison Palizzolo

Fortunately, due to the efforts of John Stomberg and many other folks working for Hood, the museum will continue exhibiting art in a newly opened space on Main street in Hanover New Hampshire named Hood Downtown. Though the space is a bit smaller than the soon-to-be-expanded Hood Museum, Hood Downtown will use its central location and strategic space as a platform for global contemporary art, or, as Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, curator of African Art, said, “We’re interested in showing living artists from all over the world. We wanted to make this inviting, bringing the global to the local.”

Smooth is the curator of the second exhibition to enter the new downtown space featuring Iranian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Bahar Behbahni titled Let the Garden Eram flourish. Mostly through painting, but also through objects and video, Behbahni captures the fraught majesty of these Persian or Iranian gardens and lends her own subjective, specific historical context to the green spaces. Filling Hood Downtown with redacted documents, paintings, and depictions of reimagined historical timelines, Bahar seeks to show not only her work inspired by the reality of the gardens but also, according to Smooth, “the objects that served as an inspiration for the exhibition.”

Bahar Behbahani, Chronicle of the Garden, from the Let the Garden Eram Flourish series, 2016

Hood Downtown will continue with programming contemporary art for Dartmouth students and the broader community until the expansion at the Hood Museum is complete. Until then, keep track of their Upcoming Exhibitions at Hood Downtown. 

Hood Downtown is a new, temporary exhibition space on 53 Main Street, Hanover New Hampshire. Let the Garden Eram Flourish will be on view at Hood Downtown January 12, 2016 through March 12, 2017. Check out the Hood Museum at Darthmouth’s Facebook page for updates on the expansion and up-coming exhibitions.

All photos courtesy Hood Museum

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