New Bedford Art Museum transforms for current exhibit

“I’m just an animal looking for home. Share the same space for a minute or two. And you love me till my stops, love me till I’m dead”

— Talking Heads

In order to accommodate the ambitious and engaging exhibition “Some Things We Can Do Together” at the New Bedford Art Museum / ArtWorks!, that institution’s Skylight Gallery has been radically altered, almost to the point of disorientation.

A large wall (albeit temporary) cuts through the room, creating a series of new spaces and architectural surprises that provide a dynamic setting for the work of Megan and Murray McMillan, a wife and husband art team, who, working with collaborators and assistants, creating large scale sculptures, thought provoking videos, and photographs documenting the process.

The McMillans have been married since 1997 and the viewer can, in some cases- feel like he or she has stumbled upon an intimate moment, even if that intimacy is metaphorical or allegorical in nature.

The videos, none of which are more than a few minutes long, suggest moments of domesticity, sensuality, consumerism, playfulness, work ethic, and mortality without ever becoming truly explicit.

Memories are awoken, possibilities considered, longings realized and fears processed all in quiet ways in spite of the large-sale theatricality of it all. Ingenuity and artifice reveal subtle common truths.

“While She Waits for the Light” begins with a well-dressed man walking through a space, that seems part imaginary high end department store and part cell block, in which dozens of lamps glow in simple framed boxes, all painted red.

He takes a lamp and passes it through a window to a woman who receives it as if she were a worker at a conveyor belt. She sends it away on a cart before she slumps to the floor for the briefest of moments. The lamp’s journey ends at another window, where a couple are engaged in office chit-chat, unaware or unconcerned about the arrival of the lamp.

Office politics are more important than illumination.

“When We Didn’t Touch the Ground” features adults climbing a bedsheet like a rope ladder to a two-by-four hovering treehouse, and piling sandbags and other materials on which to walk, evoking the inventiveness of children at play when ”the floor is hot lava!”

It was startling to turn a corner in the gallery and see two giant crows pecking at a tray of food and squabbling. It is the only video in the exhibition devoid of a clear human presence, other than the placing of the camera and the editing that followed. The video, like the exhibition itself, is called “Some Things We Can Do Together.”

The crows (and sparrows, doves, blue jays and grackles, most often in pairs) eat seed, or grapes, strawberries or orange segments. They sing, they screech, they coo, they share and they don’t, they argue, they leave together... like human couples do.

“What We Loved and Forgot” is rather moving. It has been many years since a work of art brought a tear to my cynical eye, but this one did.

A man sits in an easy chair, a pile of newspaper beneath him as if it were his past. A preternaturally bright white light glows behind him in a doorway of sorts and for a moment, he is oblivious to it. He turns to the opening and stands and and “goes toward the light” ascending on unseen stairs, an overwrought cliche if there ever was one.

But it is rescued from cliche by the next scene. A woman is in a kitchen, chopping vegetables. The man arrives and sits in a floating glowing box beyond her that she cannot see or doesn’t acknowledge. He sits, glances at her briefly and looks away.

She walks away from her kitchen counter, unaware that she just became a widow.

There is a purposeful ambivalence in the work of the McMillans. And that was my takeaway. Yours may differ.

“Some Things We Can Do Together” is on display at the New Bedford Art Museum / ArtWorks!, 608 Pleasant St. until Nov. 17.

An opening reception will be held Sept. 12, from 6 to 9 p.m.

Don Wilkinson is a painter and art critic who lives in New Bedford. Contact him at Don.Wilkinson@gmail.com. His reviews run each week in Coastin’.

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