PULSE
Gallery encourages art with a message

By David Wildman, Globe Correspondent, 1/28/2001

t The Gallery of Social/Political Art in Copley Square, there are no rules, and the gallery's curators often consider the message behind the artwork to be as important as the quality. To some artists, this is a very freeing concept.

''I think it's one art gallery that is truly for the artist, where you can just let go and say what you feel,'' says Bob Orsillo, a multimedia artist from Nottingham, N.H.

''Commercial galleries look at what the perception of the market is going to be. I feel this gallery is the closest thing to real art.''

Orsillo, who shows his eye-catching modern photo imagery nationwide at galleries from Beverly Hills to South Berwick, Maine, is currently displaying three new pieces at the small gallery as part of the ''Environmental Injustice'' series.

Started in 1996 in space donated by the social activist Community Church of Boston, the Gallery of Social/Political Art gives artists a chance to make politically conscious statements without regard to how the aesthetes in the art community at large will judge their work.

Curated by gallery founder Yoshiro Sanbonmatsu and painter Idahlia Stanley, both of whom are showing work in the current exhibit, the show features 22 artists and has brought out different viewpoints on the endangered environment, some more instantly recognizable than others.

''Frequently it isn't obvious what the artist is talking about,'' says Stanley. ''That's why we always post the artists statements.''

Stanley's painting of twisting, mutated shapes rising out of a bleak landscape is one of the more abstract works in the show.

''It came out of my visit to the museum at Hiroshima,'' explains Stanley. ''It shows absolute destruction.''

Sanbonmatsu's installation ''Migration Rights'' is more what you might expect from political art; the tone is aggressive and it's hard to miss the meaning.

Sanbonmatsu, who comes from a strong background as a political organizer, literally puts the writing on the walls. He has erected a Statue of Liberty holding a replica of an uzi and decorated it with dollar signs, sale ads and anti-imperialist slogans. Impassioned graffiti all over the installation refers to migration rights and conquistadors.

Other pieces refer more directly to man's relationship with nature. In one of Jeanne-Marie Crede's offerings, an idyllic watercolor painting of a deer is framed by a rusted shard of discarded metal. Maxime McDonald takes heavily textured black and white photographs of peeling paint and trash piled around abandoned homes, factories and warehouses throughout Massachusetts.

Yuko Adachi's installation ''Can't See it, Can't Smell It, Can't Taste It'' illustrates the toll chemical products and genetically produced additives take on the environment and on human bodies. One of the ways Adachi demonstrates this is by putting M&M candies into separate plastic bags of water in an attempt, he says, to reveal the additives that coat the sweets.

Environmental Injustices runs through March 4 at the Gallery of Social/Political Art, 565 Boylston St., Boston. There will be a reception on Friday from from 5 to 7:30 p.m. Regular hours are Friday and Saturday, 2-6 p.m, and Sunday, 1:30-5 p.m. Call 266-6710 or 508-830-0468.

This story ran on page 11 of the Boston Globe's City Weekly on 1/28/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.