Art Gallery

Alice Dodge's review in Seven Days

https://www.sevendaysvt.com/arts-culture/artreview/apple-packaging-is-in-season-at-adamant-co-op-art-show

Apple can attribute its success to many factors, from investing in smart advertising to inventing the smartphone. Among the company’s biggest and perhaps most overlooked innovations is the way it has designed its packaging to be as clean and seamless as its screens. The company made unboxing — opening a new product for the first time — an intrinsic part of the anticipatory consumer experience. But what becomes of the oh-so-pretty, not-quite-disposable box?

Twenty-two central Vermont artists have come up with some wildly creative options in “Think Different” at the Adamant Co-op, on view through October 30. All the works in the show are made from donated Apple packaging, from giant iMac boxes to tiny ones that held an Apple Pencil or a set of AirPods.

Dan Thorington’s sculpture “The Parcel” is its own unboxing fantasy. The lid of a laptop box, propped against a wall, reveals a painting of a summer sky. On the shelf in front of it, a tree grows out of a just-opened brown paper package lined with tissue. The tree and the field below it are made from cut paper: Tiny windswept blades of grass hide tinier flowers. Below the tree, a stream reflects its branches. A pair of bluebirds sail in to land. It’s an exquisite sculpture that can be taken in at a glance and then carefully explored like its own little world.

“The Parcel” by Dan Thorington Alice Dodge © Seven Days

Marjorie Merena has several expertly crafted contributions to the show, including four cut-paper accordion books housed in iPhone boxes. One, convincingly labeled “ApplePiPhone,” displays the digits of pi meticulously cut in horizontal stripes on each of the book’s folds. Another, “Shadow Alphabet and Numbers,” floats white cut-out numbers and letters over colored backgrounds. Her books are bold, with strong typographic choices that echo Apple’s clean graphic designs.

Another of Merena’s pieces, “Flavia’s Refrigerator,” relies instead on illustration skills. Flavia, a black-and-white cartoon cat, lounges atop her Apple Watch box turned fridge. Flaps in the packaging are now fridge doors, revealing cans of cat food, fish-themed ice cream and a bag of live goldfish, all drawn in super detailed black pen and ink.

One of the most intriguing assemblages is also one of the simplest: Janet MacLeod’s “Ode to Louise Nevelson.” MacLeod has glued a number of plain white Apple boxes together, adding in a few black rectangles and preserving the voids and hollows of the boxes’ paper and plastic innards. Though tongue in cheek, it does slightly recall Nevelson’s masterful monochrome sculptures. Like them, it provokes a back-and-forth between object and negative space.

“Memory Box #2: I was once a hunter of fireflies and bugs” by James Arisman Alice Dodge © Seven Days

Most of the works in the show are lighthearted and fun: Juliana Jennings threads a phone made of Dixie cups and string through her iPhone box; MacLeod turns another into a bath, complete with rubber ducks and a curious cat.

Terry Allen’s take, however, addresses the elephant in the room: Apple itself. In “OS X Marshfield Mountain,” she has collaged a MacBook Pro box with images of the Foxconn factories in China where iPhones are made and facts from reports on terrible labor conditions there. A wall label points out the irony of having edited the photos on a MacBook Pro.

It’s a good acknowledgement of the issues surrounding our lust for gadgets, even as the show as a whole takes a relaxed stance on the ethics of consumerism and the environmental problems inherent even in the fanciest packaging. “Don’t sweat it,” it seems to say. “Just play with the box.”

“Think Different,” on view through October 30 at the Adamant Co-op Gallery. adamantcoop.org