GALLERIES
A moving mix
of the concrete and suggestive
By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent, 1/24/2003
Art that rocks
Years ago, I traveled in Ireland with my mother and we stopped by Newgrange,
an excavated burial mound thousands of years old; it's Ireland's tourist equivalent
of Stonehenge. Circling the mound, my mother put her hand on one of the stones
and felt it throb beneath her touch.
Mom would appreciate Jane
Hudson's ''Trilogy,'' a loop of videos and digital prints from those videos
on view at Gallery 28 at the New England School of Art and Design at Suffolk
University. Hudson visited Avebury, a British site 5,000 years old, where standing
stones set to mark solstices were probably a site for rituals. Avebury doesn't
have the cachet of Stonehenge, in part because Christians erected a town in
the middle of the circle of megaliths, blocking sightlines and destroying some
of the stones.
''Stones,'' the first of the
three videos, is intended to be projected at a scale as large as the monuments
themselves; here, unfortunately, it's on a 15-inch monitor. It's a shame, but
at least we can imagine the impact the show would have at its proper size.
In ''Stones,'' Hudson alters
the video to make it look like old, grainy black-and-white film. One image grows
to fill the screen, then disappears, creating a rhythm of walking from rock
to rock. The soundtrack offers up a howling wind and the occasional bird song.
Then, amid the gray, Hudson introduces surprising color: blue bolts of electricity
buzz across a stone. The sky eerily reddens. In this way, she imbues these old
monuments with an elemental life and power that inspire reverence - perhaps
the same reverence that accompanied their erection millennia ago.
But Hudson isn't merely being
reverent; she's mourning. Her subject is the stones, but it's also that urge
to put the stones up, and the later urge to destroy them. ''Tale,'' the second
video, made after the scourge of hoof and mouth disease in England brought on
the burning of herds of cattle, poetically examines the bent toward destruction:
a human mask flashes through pastures and brooks; sheep light on fire; a goose
takes on a radioactive glow. But the third video, ''Cycle,'' concludes that
death and life always come around again.
This is hardly a new theme,
but Hudson plumbs it with haunting eloquence, tying ancient and natural imagery
with unnerving colors to create a visual pageantry of grief and hope.
Jane Hudson: Trilogy: Digital
Prints and Video
At: New England School of Art and Design at Suffolk University, 75 Arlington
St., Jan.17 through Feb. 6. 617-573-8785. http://www.suffolk.edu/nesad/whtml/wgallery.html