You can have yourself a very leftist Christmas at the BCA Center’s “Reference for Radicals” show. It features work by a dozen local artists who have given visual expression to political terms included in a booklet on “movement building” that was compiled for this project.
Many of the terms — such as direct action, Occupy movement and empowerment — will be readily familiar to most viewers. Definitions are probably unnecessary, but the show’s organizers provide them anyway. They also present a lot of amateurish art. But a few professionally executed pieces make it worth visiting a show that runs through January 8.
The most artistically successful work in the exhibit is its least explicitly political. (That combination will not surprise aesthetes who regard “political art” as an oxymoron.) Carol MacDonald’s monoprint etching of a flock of birds encircling a piece of red fabric — or possibly a bloody gash — is correlated to the term “vigil,” though it’s not clear why. The birds appear to be about to pull and peck at the object; it’s not as though they’re bearing silent witness to whatever it is.
But the apparent disconnect between word and image won’t interfere with viewers’ appreciation of MacDonald’s skill.
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