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Theater & art


What’s up at Boston-area art galleries

Caleb Charland’s “Attempting to Paddle Straight at the Moon.”

Caleb Charland’s “Attempting to Paddle Straight at the Moon.”

Caleb Charland, a Mr. Wizard for the photography set, has an exhibit documenting some of his science experiments up at Gallery Kayafas. How many potatoes does it take to power a lamp? What does the life cycle of a lima bean look like? What happens when you drip hot candle wax on photographic paper?

Unlike Mr. Wizard, who had a science show for kids in the early days of television, Charland’s endpoint isn’t knowledge. It’s beauty. To light up that lamp, he didn’t merely plug it into dozens of potatoes. He found a potato field. The lamp in the uncanny “Potato Power, La Joie Growers LLC, Van Buren, Maine” takes on an eerie glow in a dusky blue light thanks not only to the spuds, but to a long exposure that gathered what light there was on film, and made a sparkling canopy of stars arcing overhead.

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Some of Charland’s exploits are more like Zen riddles than science. He set his camera and tripod in the bow of a canoe for “Attempting to Paddle Straight at the Moon.” Who can paddle a canoe in a straight line? Again, a long exposure plays a crucial role. The canoe’s prow points like an arrow at a boulevard of light, the moon’s reflection on the water. But the moon itself is a horizontal squiggle in the night sky, galumphing back and forth with the boat’s inevitable motion.


Gallery Kayafas, 450 Harrison Ave., 617-482-0411.

Closing date:
June 22

In the end, Charland’s experiments are more explorations with camera, film, and photographic paper than they are investigations of the natural world. Maybe that’s why the results are more like magic than science.

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Maggie Stark, also at Kayafas, took inspiration from the 2009 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall for her videos and photographs. She uses playground motifs to explore division and duality in crisp, understated, strictly choreographed works freighted with menace.

A time-lapse still from Maggie Stark’s “Still/Time” video.


The “Still/Time” video and photos feature barely illuminated seesaws as people walk back and forth across them. Stark abstracts the scene; most of what we see is the rise and fall of the seesaws in a metronomic tick-tock. The performers are in the dark, but they wear headlamps that trace paths of light through the dimness. One photo from this series, with the sharp angles of the seesaw below and the wavering lights above, makes a stunning match to Charland’s “Attempting to Paddle,” but the moods, and the contexts, differ substantially. Stark uses play to delineate how fear and safety jockey in the human psyche. Charland simply plays.

Gorgeous and creepy




The mess before

Jemison Faust is a personal organizer, so “The Before Part of What I Do,” her show at Bromfield Gallery, examines the mess before organization occurs. Her mixed-media paintings and three-dimensional collages wryly capture the emotional fog that can accompany clutter.

In “The Before Part of What I Do #17,” an expertly composed painting, the foreground brims with brightly colored plastic items and snarled wires and cables; Faust knows the eye-popping appeal of colored plastic. But the scene recedes into a smoggy miasma, like the funk exuding from a landfill.

She makes her collages from the stuff she excavates. “The Before Part of What I Do #25” features a tiny list: “Heat/Lie flat/No pillow/Get rid of car.” There’s a toy ambulance bound up in elastics, a jewelry box with a fingertip-sized dome inside, and a puddle of resin. These surrealist associations add up to a small narrative of desperation that is still, somehow, lit up by playfulness.

Lesley Cohen’s abstract drawings in charcoal and chalk pastel, also at Bromfield, are elemental. Marks seem to seep out of the paper’s grain, like lichen growing in the folds of tree bark. “Loosened Junctures” recalls a section of a spiny tree trunk, dying and invaded by vines. “Open Question” comes unveiled in the center, with floating whispers of gray surrounded by shudders of encroaching darkness. These drawings feel deeply private and raw, the essence of mark-making.

More information:


Bright Beast

At: The Lilypad, 1353 Cambridge St., Cambridge, through June 16.



The Before Part of What I Do


Visible Trace

At: Bromfield Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave., through June 29. 617-451-3605,

Cate McQuaid can be reached at

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