When I was in Boston a couple of weeks ago, we drove out to Mass MoCA. Given it was about 4 degrees, we did not reprise the sleeping outside, and early morning swim aspects of our last visit (instead we stayed in Jae’s Inn, run by the proprietors of the Boston Jae’s restaurants, which featured, among other amenities, a Jae’s on the premises). We went largely to see Ann Hamilton’s corpus in the Building 5 gallery.
The basic idea is 40 “pneumatic mechanisms” are perched in the rafters above the yawning gallery, each one releasing, at random, periodic intervals a single sheet of paper to come fluttering down to the cement floor. The paper has a sort of vellum like texture. In the course of the 10 month installation the paper piles higher, and higher. Currently it has a covered the space to a sort of deep ankle depth; enough that it billows and crunches when you walk across the vast floor. It all sounds kind of banal, but it was wonderfully immersive, and atmospheric.

The other show going on was Yankee Remix, which included an excellent piece of video by Lorna Simpson, and several other interesting pieces. However I was most intrigued by Zoe Leonards For Which it Stands which short circuited the post-show visit to the museum store to buy postcards by making the postcards into the art. Also, intentionally or not (there is no explicit reference to it) she incorporates those two most important Yankee symbols – commerce, and the one dollar bill – into her work, making it by far, I thought, the most effective of piece in the show.

There are, of course, a few photos. However most of the lush nature scenes, and many of the low light galleries where shot on Jasmine’s new camera, but we’re hoping she’ll upload them soon.