Secrets in the Doors

Expect the unexpected at annual DeCordova show

 For contemporary artists, creating original art can be as exhilarating or precarious as body surfing through a rip tide.

Hug familiar shores and get stuck with the crowd. Head into deep waters alone and risk never coming back.

Choosing materials as varied as bath towels and brain waves, melons and memories, a dozen artists featured in the 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition have created provocative art that challenges viewers mostly without drowning them in pretension or obscurantism.

Kevin clark

At its satisfying best, this show offers wildly varied art that invites visitors to engage it intimately as active participants rather than passive viewers.

Instead of just displaying it, several artists ask your help finishing their work by becoming viscerally involved with it.

Vanessa Tropeano shoots haunting minimalist photographs that draw you into her own family’s real and imagined history. Wearing lab coats, performers from The Institute for Infinitely Small Things stage a theatrical inquiry in Chicago’s streets and parks into the war on terror.

Other artists transport you into new worlds constructed from the unlikeliest materials.

Mitchel K. Ahern transforms T-shirts and beach blankets into Zen-like riddles that subvert the everyday slogans of advertising and politics. By scanning artists’ and engineers’ brains, Eva Lee processes neurological data measuring their emotional states into fantastic video dreamscapes.

They’re just some of the exciting artists whose work confounds predictable expectations by nudging or jolting you into fresh ways of seeing.

Born in Russia and educated in Colorado, Boston artist Yana Payusova bundles real and imagined memories from her Soviet childhood into grim and funny ink and acrylic paintings. Using Civil War-era technology, photographer David Prifti freezes his 21st century subjects in the sepia-tinted gravity of the past.

Since 1989, the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park has staged an annual show that highlights new work by mid-career emerging and established artists.

Organized by curator Nick Capasso, Director of Curatorial Affairs Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Assistant Curator Dina Deitsch and curatorial fellow Kate Dempsey, this exhibit features 11 individual artists and a Cambridge-based collective with a changing cast of members. Deitsch said the exhibitors were chosen by consensus from about 50 suggestions by the four curators.

Annual shows aren’t typically organized over “any single or over-arching theme,” she said. For this exhibit, several artists, Deitsch said, use performances to examine connections between their works and viewers, traditional and experimental materials and the self and its environment.

Deitsch described the exhibit as “a broad snapshot” of cutting-edge work by artists from Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire.

Several exciting works, she said, reveal “a certain excitement by artists playing with recognizable things and tweaking them into something else.”

In this show, Deitsch said several artists create paintings, photos or performances that express “incomplete or ambiguous narratives.”

Others examine the “use of public space” since 9/11 in different ways.

“There’s a lot of artists who work with performance. There are artists who translate the everyday into something else,” said Deitsch.

As Americans watch more “reality TV” than news about Iraq, organizers seem to have chosen artists whose works goad viewers into peeling back layers of artifice and contrivance to determine what, if anything, is real.

As if slipping in and out of restless sleep, Matt Brackett paints bold, even lurid scenes he calls “invented memories fixed alongside the actual ones.”

At twilight, a father and son hoist a mysterious bundle with rope threaded over the limbs of a spectral tree. Perched atop a cliff, a young man and woman in “Threshold” gaze across a rocky chasm toward distant woods. In the ominous “Equinox,” a strange man stands in shallow water watching a rowboat holding a family of four drift toward a swirling vortex.

As Brackett and his wife prepare for their first child’s birth, his striking unfinished scenes leave viewers suspended between despair and possibility.

Born in Japan but raised in a Colonial-era American farmhouse, Niho Kozuru casts gelatinous rubber into shapes resembling balusters, sprockets and even a lotus, piled atop one another into translucent columns. Descended from generations of Japanese ceramicists, she creates culture-spanning art that looks as ephemeral as a sunbeam but as tasty as a gumdrop …

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