Revenge of the smily faces The 2004 DeCordova Annual Exhibition BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

The first thing I do in the morning is go to the middle of the first section of the New York Times for the little insert box — tucked like a punctuation mark among the news reports on battles and official maneuverings — that identifies the latest (American) dead. I read their names and their ages, sometimes their rank, always their home town. And maybe it’s a function of beginning each day thinking about shattered lives that makes any disappointing art exhibit all the harder to take. What am I doing looking at art when people are dying?

But people are always dying, which means the question is always fair. War just sharpens it, intensifying our impatience with everything inessential. And if there’s a special challenge to artists during wartime, it lies in producing work that qualifies as essential.

The 2004 DeCordova Annual Exhibition, one of the most important showcases for emerging and mid-career artists in New England, has lived up to that test frequently since its establishment in 1989. Unfortunately, this is not one of those years. The press release asserts that "the premise of the exhibition has been to show the work of a small group of contemporary artists from the six New England states, emphasizing the quality and variety of their works rather than any single or overarching theme." And yet it’s precisely an overarching theme that’s undermined this year’s exhibit. The 2004 DeCordova Annual appears to have been overtaken by a strained and transparently phony playfulness, as if the curators had put the word out that only most demonstrably frolicsome art would make it into the show. I had a sense of watching a lot of grown-ups making sand castles at the beach while wearing business attire. One work after another competes to be bigger, brighter, and sillier than the next, or slyer, subtler, and more ironic than the next. This is an exhibit stuck in the eighth grade. Seldom have I had less interest in a show — that’s how polite it is.

It doesn’t help that the emotional range runs the gamut of what you experience watching the WGBH Auction. Have the curators forgotten the intensity of play or the renegade spirit of frolic? With a few exceptions, the artists in this year’s exhibit seem to regard their work as places of high, humorless reverence where true believers find redemption. How else do you explain William Hosie’s Second Sitting? An extensive (though hardly sprawling; it occupies maybe a third of the floor space in the main gallery), mildly whimsical mixed-media construction of interconnected geometric forms, it reminded me of an elephantine version of the toys they sell for executives’ desks — orderly, careful, neither surprising nor predictable. A 10-foot wooden dowel connects a sphere to a platform; a spool the size of a bicycle tire lies on its side; a miniature staircase sports steps of random shapes. It is a work that aspires to little more than gentle bemusement. Is it smart? Sure. Is it painstakingly executed? Without a doubt. Will I remember it a year from now? Unlikely.

I tried hard, I really did, to get behind Leslie Bostrom’s in-your-face æsthetic with her gigantic paintings (nine by seven feet on average) of cartoonish birds in symbol-drenched surroundings. I failed. None of my efforts could alter the sense that Bostrom’s birds signify an entirely self-conscious exercise in style. She’s not finding something out, she’s telling. Further, that style is not marked by sophistication or energy or much to say. In the catalogue, Bostrom claims that her "images show some of the environmental consequences of everyday American consumption." In fact, they don’t, at least not in the sense of making you experience horror or remorse or futility or anger. They serve up the consequences of consumption with a stale, I-told-you-so attitude, as if the reminder were fresh or her palette inventive. A wide-eyed, oil-drenched cormorant stares out from Black Muck = Dead Duck like Groucho Marx making an aside to the camera. With a head the size of the oil tanker sinking in the background and the red circles of its eyes reminiscent of a giant stuffed animal, this isn’t an alarm, it’s a joke.

A few artists manage to cut through cute and arrive at a place of wonder. The Somerville-based Beth Galston creates installations that recall movie sets. In her Luminous Gardens #2 (Night Meadow), hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small, variously colored, flower-shaped lights atop waist-high, leafless stems glow in a darkened space. It takes a second for your eyes to adjust when you pass through the pair of black curtains that set off Luminous Gardens from the rest of the third-floor gallery. And until they do, you’ll find yourself walking cautiously through the zigzagging path while the surrounding ornaments twinkle like a night-time field of fireflies. It’s a quiet, wondrous spectacle — suddenly you’re two years old again and looking for the first time into a kaleidoscope.

What wasn’t quiet was the annoying whir of a wall-mounted fan, and at first, I resented its interfering with Galston’s magical peace. But no sooner had I made my way to the exit curtains than I noticed, or thought I noticed, that the flowers were moving. Or were they? Maybe I had just caught sight of a far-off bulb, or maybe the motion was the result of the slight vertigo induced by standing in a pitch-black room lit only by many tiny lights. So I made myself stand perfectly still and survey the expanse of Luminous Gardens. And indeed, all the flowers were moving; every bright, crystal blossom swayed almost imperceptibly on its willowy wire stem in what I came to appreciate as the fan-created breeze. The kaleidoscope was alive. I just hope that Galston can find a less intrusive wind producer to complement the subtlety of her installation.

String theory meets noodle shop in the color prints of Toru Nakanishi, whose subject matter is nothing other than the mounds of dried and fresh noodles available at your local Asian grocer. Nakanishi doesn’t take pictures per se. He places the food on a scanner, with the result that the intricate knots of wiry carbohydrates — they vary in color and texture depending on the flour from which they were made — look as if they were lit by a solitary, celestial beacon and suspended in outer space. The sharp clarity of the particular strands within each mound of noodles combines dramatically with their empty, smooth, black backgrounds. They look almost like jewels. There’s undeniable humor here in the juxtaposition of such extremes, pasta in a reverse Tiffany setting, so that each of Nakanishi’s frames straddles the divide separating the ridiculous from the sublime. At the same time, the sacramental regard for noodles can last just so long before you start wishing the artist would take on a subject matter as faceted as his technique.

Sean Foley paints phantasmagoric networks of unidentifiable objects — his images made me think of what squid stew would look like to someone on an acid trip. Similarly provocative is Gil Scullion’s Follow the Leader Project, whose large glass-and-steel cases have painted on them black images that resemble film negatives. Interactive installations by Henry Kaufman and Brian Knep offer little more than technical wizardry. Fog and mist and lots of natural but unobtrusive imagery fill the color photos by Mary Lang; deliberate gentleness of a more abstract kind describes Sandy Litchfield’s mixed-media wall drawing. Al Souza’s creations based on jigsaw puzzles and Sandy Winters’s installation that looks like an effort to channel Jules Verne complete the show.

The 2004 DeCordova Annual Exhibition

At the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 51 Sandy Pond Road in Lincoln, through September 5.