BOSTON ART REVIEW

Caroline Bagenal’s Swimming Sculptures Explore the Healing Power of Water
by Karolina Hać

In Boston Sculptors Gallery’s LaunchPad space, Caroline Bagenal brings her captivating Swimming Sculptures onto dry land. The works on view emerged after the artist, who splits her time between Massachusetts and the United Kingdom, suffered injuries from a bike accident in 2021 and took to swimming outdoors as part of her recovery process. Buoyant and untethered from gravity, Bagenal investigates how connecting with a river’s ecosystem can be therapeutic, even transformational. Like some of Bagenal’s previous works, which play with pattern and scale through commonplace materials, the tentacles are made from recycled plastic, bubble wrap, and other floating textiles. But in this incredibly personal series, the artist embraces her physical vulnerability and finds solace and support in water as she explores movement in a different plane.

Lining the wall is a series of seven-by-five and fourteen-by-eleven inch photographs of the artist swimming in rivers and lakes, which Bagenal has punctured with colorful thread in geometric patterns. Through this simple gesture, the artist evolves from a swimmer to a creature connected to the water, visualizing her body extending in space, expanding, flowing, engaging with the water. Though these photographs are described as part of her process of creating the tentacle sculptures and enhance the intimacy evoked throughout the series, they dazzle in their own right. Because process is a critical part of this body of work, I found myself wishing for a way to be more immersed in these studies.
Connecting with bodies of water can be such a gentle and profound way to heal that Bagenal’s meditations on being one with the river instantly resonated. On her Instagram, she writes, “Swimming in cold water is exhilarating and is healing mentally and physically for me. As I enter the river, the cold water creates a strong prickling sensation. After swimming for a few minutes I return to land. My skin is bright red and I’m filled with amazement.” I walked away sharing in this amazement, hoping that perhaps in the future we can experience it again on a grander scale, so the profoundness of the practice for the artist can be fully embraced by the viewer.

“Caroline Bagenal: Swimming Sculptures” is on view at Boston Sculptors Gallery through December 10.

Karolina Hać is a writer and creative professional working at the intersection of art, culture, and the built environment. She has been a contributing writer at Boston Art Review since 2018, and her writing has appeared in Landscape Architecture Magazine, Amadeus Magazine, and Big Red & Shiny. She currently runs development operations at the Boston Society for Architecture as its advancement manager.

Caroline Bagenal / Strata

Exhibition Dates: May 6 – June 7, 2015

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 9, 4 – 7 pm

Artist’s Talk : May 23, 5 – 6 pm

SOWA First Friday Reception: June 5, 5 – 8 pm

Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Sunday, 12 – 6 pm

GALLERIES
Moeller heightens urgency with pop-up show at Mills

By Cate McQuaid GLOBE CORRESPONDENT APRIL 21, 2015


Nobody at the opening reception for “Yeah, You Missed It!” — an ambitious, nimble pop-up show last Friday and Saturday at the Boston Center for the Arts Mills Gallery — was allowed to take a picture. Experiencing art through a camera lens distances you from the art, and this show was about immediacy.

“Yeah, You Missed It!” is one in a series of brief exhibitions curator Robert Moeller has mounted, and the first in a formal gallery setting. Their fugitive quality adds urgency; each is more like a one-time performance than an exhibition you can squeeze in according to your schedule.

Moeller hung paintings higher than we’re used to, and included installations that ran from floor to ceiling. If craning to see the art was slightly more effortful, it also shifted the nature of a viewer’s attention, which was a bit fraught, lively, and a lot less contemplative. That’s not to say the work wasn’t arresting; it’s more that Moeller had throttled up the viewing experience. His zippy selection of artists, spanning highly acclaimed to newly on the radar, also added buoyancy.

Painter Anthony Palocci Jr.’s “Looking Up” set the tone. Palocci finds abstraction in mundane scenes; here, he has us gazing through a mesh screen up at a high rise. The black grid of the screen vaults upward, as yellow and red gleam amid passages of gray beyond it. Meanwhile, “Downs and Ups,” painter A.B. Miner’s graceful diptych nearby, captures two faces of the same man in profile. One looks down, resigned; the other gazes upward, tender and open.

Formal correspondences ricocheted around the space. The thick mesh in Palocci’s painting nodded to Raul Gonzalez III’s mixed-media drawing “Black Cloud Buzzing,” in which a man trapped in a densely gridded cage watches the approach of a black cloud seeded with insect wings.

Really more a sculpture, Caroline Bagenal’s “Text Drawing” is a grid made of reeds wrapped in tightly coiled newspapers and rapturous colors. Some of these lines arc, others are straight; it’s part boat, part sleigh, part net. In the show it hung near Franklin Evans’s mixed-media watercolor “Handstapematisse,” which floats several samples of a Matisse image of hands in a soft, blinking fuchsia grid beside an off-kilter assortment of colored tape.

On the surface, Gonzalez’s dire narrative, Palocci’s urban landscape, Bagenal’s abstract sculpture, and Evans’s dreamy, art historical montage appear to be in different realms. Like members of the same family, they use their genetic material — the grid — in varied ways, but the fleeting resemblances add context and deepen meaning.

Two spare, totemic installations faced off in opposite corners of the gallery. Pat Falco’s untitled assemblage featuring graphic drawings (one depicts a newspaper headline: “Everybody Dies. Nobody Minds.”), including one on the screen of a small TV abuzz with static, was comic and deeply melancholy.

Andrea Sherrill Evans’s “Firewood,” a series of watercolors depicting the cut ends of logs, ran up the wall in a disorienting syncopation. We associate firewood with tidy stacking, but these pieces skittered upward like frightened birds. Their round forms recall faces, which gazed across the gallery at Falco’s sad figures.

If you missed it, it was a vibrant, smart, bustling exhibition – in addition to the visual art, four performance artists performed at the opening. Keep an eye out. Maybe Moeller will do it again.