Wonderland

review by Tammy Nguyen

03/14/17

Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art

There’s nothing that makes you feel as small as walking through Mass MoCA, a museum in a converted factory in North Adams, Massachusetts. The space is huge and the placement of the artworks makes you feel as though you are tiny. Most of the artworks are hung up high on the wall or encased in tall glass pedestals. Parts of the museum, where works are supposed to be clearly looked at, are well lit and other parts, where the works are more conceptual and ambiguous, are dimly lit. The art is spaced far away from each other, creating a space where the person looking at a piece of art is not interrupted by the temptation to move onto the next piece.

One of the biggest exhibitions in Mass MoCA is Sol Lewitt’s. It extends three floors and each floor has works from his early, middle, and late career. Out of the three, his early work is most interesting. It is very geometrically driven, and from afar it looks chaotic, but when you look closely, it has an order and a definite method. It is satisfying to look at, and its size makes whoever walks by marvel at the finesse it took to create these walls.

Another piece that is frighteningly big is Nick Cave’s Until, the costliest artwork to be displayed at Mass MoCA. The installation consists of a landscape of these spinning, metallic ornaments. They cast light onto the floor and make a subtle whirring noise. At first, you are amazed by the size of the art, how the ornaments are hanged so that it creates a path for you to walk through. However, when you look closely, you see ornaments that have guns in them, and they are spinning around as if pointing the barrel at anybody. This is Nick Cave’s way of responding to violence deaths like Trayvon Martin’s, Eric Garner’s, or Michael Brown’s. The path of ornaments then leads to a cloud made out of crystals full of birds, flowers, and black face lawn jockeys, which suggests that racism is everywhere. The work looks pretty and non-threatening at first, but when looked closer at can have a profound message that makes you feel the power of art.