Excerpt from
Installment Plan
By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent
April 6, 2006
Alternative placement
Second Gallery is a new alternative space in South Boston that recently opened with the courageous agenda of showing only installation and new-media work. Up now: two installations, one that works and one that's merely hokey.
Alexandre Singh's ''A Thousand and One Knights of the Round Table of Knottingham" slyly suggests that abstraction's rejection of narrative is pure bunk: Narrative cannot be escaped.
The installation, a hodgepodge of flat planes and bright colors mixed with objects that signify storytelling (a Persian carpet for folktales; Pepsi bottles for advertising), makes you feel as if you've stepped into a Modernist painting, encroached upon by the detritus of society. Eerie colored lights emanate from an LED screen set inside a cardboard box. A mystical story about a motorcycle gang leader named Yves Klein who falls in with some shamans is piped in. It's a smart, funny piece of work.
Goody-B. Wiseman examines macabre stories of the Victorian area specific to southeastern Massachusetts -- in particular, the Lizzie Borden tale. But the environment she creates, covering furniture with old sheets, seems both trite and forced, and a video -- of a girl in a wolf's costume -- is unintentionally comic.
