G4 The Boston Globe FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2019
By Mark Feeney
GLOBE STAFF
WINCHESTER — “Photography
Atelier 30” has work by 23 photogra-
phers. They’re participants in the ate-
lier, a course run by the Griffin Muse-
um of Photography for intermediate
and advanced photographers. On the
basis of the works on display, advanced
seems the order of the day. The exhibi-
tion runs through Sept. 28. Note that a
much more extensive version is online
at photographyatelier.org.
The most obvious pleasure the
show has to offer is getting to look at
excellent images. The three photo-
graphs from Sue D’Arcy Fuller’s series
“The Journey Is the Destination” pres-
ent maps encased in ice cubes. That
sounds bizarre. It is bizarre. But the
photographs are visually marvelous,
and that’s what counts. Location, loca-
tion, location? On the rocks, on the
rocks, on the rocks.
If there were any maps in Connie
Lowell’s three “Youth in Cars” photo-
graphs, they’d come courtesy of AAA.
They show a young couple as seen
through an automobile’s windshield or
lying on the hood. The simplicity of the
set-up — the familiarity, too — make
the images very appealing. Lowell’s
pictures, which are in black and white,
have a new-car sheen (which is like a
new-car smell, only for the eyes rather
than the nose). Susan Green’s photo-
graphic quintet from “The Light You
Left Behind” are in color and much
more about texture. In one, a close-up
view of an armchair, the pebbling of
the covering has an almost dimension-
al tactility. It’s the furniture equivalent
of new-car feel. Somewhere an approv-
ing Ricardo Montalban intones the
words “rich Corinthian leather.”
A related pleasure has to do with
the juxtapositions of bodies of work.
Curation without imagination inspires
indignation. There’s nothing to be in-
dignant about here. Paula Tognarelli,
the Griffin’s director, served as curator,
with the assistance of Meg Birnbaum,
who oversees the atelier, and the pho-
tographers themselves.
The three examples from Michael
King’s “René Magritte and the Art of Il-
lusion” take staged photographic im-
ages inspired by Magritte paintings
and pair them with accompanying
texts as an homage to that master of
Surrealism. The Surrealists loved man-
nequins and dolls (each being a ver-
sion of the other). So, adjacent to
King’s pictures in an alcove are Larry
Bruns’s photographs of mannequins in
window displays, “Alchemy,” and Mi-
chele Manting’s photographs of dolls,
“Innocence Lost.”
The three photographs of lichens
from David Poorvu’s “Hiding in Plain
Sight” are so big that the subjects take
on an almost-geological density. Tex-
ture becomes a version of topography,
with Poorvu’s lichens outdoing even
Green’s leather. Lichens, in a taxonom-
ic sense, have a lot more to do with
fungi than leather. Four photographs
of the former are to be found in Jackie
Heitchue’s “The Poetry of Mush-
rooms.” Arresting in their own right,
the subjects become that much more
so, thanks to how Heitchue presents
them. Three mushrooms sprouting
from a bird’s nest? Another consorting
with spools of thread? Sure, why not.
And if the juxtapositions are a bit sur-
real, that brings us back to those
Magritte homages and their neigh-
bors. Clearly, people in Winchester
have been paying attention.
Gordon Stettinius has 16 photo-
graphs in his show “Miss Americana.”
Like Sal Taylor Kydd’s “Janus Rising,”
it runs through Oct. 20. Stettinius’s ti-
tle is a triple pun. It evokes a similarly,
though not identically, named beauty
pageant. The title also plays on the du-
al meanings of “miss” as predicate: to
“overlook” and “to regret the absence
of.” Stettinius’s point would seem to be
that there are all sorts of overlooked
contemporary examples of the old
weird America (to use Greil Marcus’s
excellent phrase). But it’s a bit of a du-bious premise. Seeing pictures of Holy-
land U.S.A. or the Creationism Muse-
um doesn’t exactly have the force of
revelation, though the implicit amia-
bility found in the name of the U.F.O.
Welcome Center is cheering. The
structure itself is spaceship-goofy, and
Stettinius photographs it with a
straight-on classicism that approxi-
mates a close encounter of the Walker
Evans kind.
Sixteen is also the number of items
in “Janus Rising” — “items” because,
while most are photographs, she in-
cludes two mixed-media sconces and a
printed text. The images are in black
and white, as are most of Stettinius’s.
In both cases, this has a distancing ef-
fect. With Kydd, the distance produces
an interiority that is strenuously poeti-
cal and highly self-aware in its lyri-
cism. An image like “Horseshoe Crab,”
though, transcends worked-up effects
to enter the realm of dream. It is at
once deeply weird, highly specific, and
matter-of-factly uncanny.Mark Feeney can be reached at
[email protected].By Nick A. Zaino III
GLOBE CORRESPONDENT
Jim Serpico loves Boston comedy.
As part of the Apostle production
company with Denis Leary, he helped
put together the lineups for the first
24 years of Comics Come Home. Now
he has struck out on his own with a
new comedy record label, Virtual
Comedy Network, which is releasing
“Best of Boston Comedy: Volume 1,”
available for download Friday. Re-
corded at Laugh Boston in July, every-
one on the album is a comedian cur-
rently living and working in Boston.
“That’s really what I wanted to try
to showcase and hopefully bring to
the attention of people around the
rest of the country and maybe even
some industry people, that there’s a
real strong pocket of comedy here in
Boston,” Serpico says.
The group includes 10 headlining
Boston comedians representing a
spectrum of ages and perspectives.
The newer generation includes Dan
Crohn, Kelly MacFarland, Corey Rod-
rigues, and Will Noonan. There are
Boston veterans from the ’80s scene
including Tony V., Steve Sweeney,
Don Gavin, and Ken Rogerson. Jim-
my Dunn and Christine Hurley land
somewhere in between those eras. “I
really liked the idea of mixing it up, of
not just one type of comedy or one
age group,” Serpico says. “I thought it
was a really good mix.”
On the album, Noonan talks about
quitting drinking. “Drinking just
didn’t really agree with me,” he says.
“It made me kind of sleepy, made my
cars crashy.” Crohn is obsessed with
true-crime shows, which have made
him note the time wherever he is.
“I’m like, what’s this guy doing?
12:51,” he says. “My whole life is pre-
paring for police questioning that’s
never going to happen.”
Hurley, a mother of five, details a
phone call from a school nurse about
letting her grade-school-aged son
pack his own lunch. “Unfortunately,”
said the nurse, “Brendan packed a
leftover box of kung pao chicken and
two wine coolers.” Rodrigues recalls
visiting the beach with his white girl-
friend’s brother who wondered why a
black man would need sunscreen.
“What do you mean why?” says Rodri-
gues. “ ’Cause I’m made out of meat,
that’s why.” Gavin, a master of one-
liners who is known as the “Godfa-
ther of Boston Comedy,” talks about
how he’s not good with money. “Four
years ago, I invested pretty much ev-passionate about Boston comedy —
his company has released albums by
locals Robert Kelly and Gary Gulman,
plus a new album by Jared Freid is
due later this month. But he’s a Long
Island guy, born and raised, and still
lives there, and he runs his compa-
nies out of Manhattan.
A jazz trumpet major at Ithaca Col-
lege, Serpico thought he’d land in the
music business. But his first job out of
college was booking comedy, and it
hooked him. “I would drive some of
these comedians to college gigs,” he
says. “And one of the first comedians
was Adam Sandler. It wasn’t like I
had an agenda, I just started doing
this stuff. I was driving Adam in the
car and he would put other people on
the phone with me, trying to get me
to book them. I just went full come-
dy.”
By 1991, he was a young manage-
ment executive at a company in New
York. That’s where he met Denis
Leary, Tony V., and other Boston com-
ics who were traveling to the city
looking for work. “I think they were
all unique in their own right, and it’s
funny first,” he says. “You could tell
that they were putting the work in for
many years before I was even in the
comedy business. That’s what
showed.”
In 1994, he started the Apostle
production company with Leary,
working on TV shows like “Rescue
Me,” “The Job,” and “Maron,” films
like “Monument Ave.,” and the annual
Comics Come Home event. Last year,
he left Apostle to start his own busi-
nesses. In that span, he had begun to
write screenplays and direct, and
wanted the independence to produceother acts. “The thing I love about the
record company is we can come up
with an idea that we’re passionate
about; we don’t have to wait for some-
one to say yes. And the Boston album
is the perfect example of that.”
In a roundabout way, living on
Long Island has made him sympa-
thetic to Boston comedians trying to
promote their careers without leaving
their hometowns. “I was told my
whole career, ‘You can’t succeed from
Long Island,’ and there’s not that
many people in the development of
TV and film that live there,” he says.
But he does travel to Hollywood often
to promote his projects.
An album like “Best of Boston”
could help local comedians expand
their reach. According to Serpico, it’s
already working. “We actually did a
blind listen on Don [Gavin],” he says,
“where a friend of mine who works at
a major agency played the track for
agents who don’t know who Don is
and weren’t told who it was. They all
flipped out trying to guess and find
out if he’s represented.”
Serpico is planning on releasing a
second volume of Boston comedy
when the time is right and with a
whole new roster. An album like this
won’t make anyone a superstar, but it
can create some buzz and help work-
ing comedians with their bottom line.
“As a label, and as a fan of comedy,” he
says, “it’s just giving them their due
and helping publicize them so they
can get more live work outside of
their local region, and get it spun and
have people talk about it.”Nick A. Zaino III can be reached at
[email protected].Album captures 10 Boston comics at their funniest
JOHN ALES‘Iwantedtotryto...
hopefullybringtothe
attentionofpeople
aroundtherestofthe
country...thatthere’s
arealstrongpocketof
comedyhere.’
JIM SERPICO (center), who put out
“Best of Boston Comedy: Volume 1”ery penny I had in gluten,” he says.
The album has a strong Boston
voice, Boston comics, and Boston
crew. The only one involved who isn’t
from Boston is Serpico himself. He’sAtelier on display,
the old weird America,
darn that dream
CONNIE LOWELL
“U.F.O. Welcome Center” (top left) by Gordon Stittinius; images from
David Poorvu’s “Hiding in Plain Sight” (top) and Connie Lowell’s “Youth
in Cars” (above).DAVID POORVUGORDON STITTINIUSPHOTOGRAPHY REVIEWPHOTOGRAPHYATELIER30
GORDONSTETTINIUS:Miss
Americana
SALTAYLORKYDD:JanusRising
Griffin Museum of Photography,
67 Shore Road, Winchester, through
Sept. 28 (“Atelier”) and Oct. 20.
781-729-1158, griffinmuseum.org