Sea-struck

The watery side of Rhode Island gets the gallery treatment in a couple of exhibitions hereabouts. The Artists for Save The Bay Sale & Exhibit, featuring hundreds of artworks in a variety of media made by more than 70 Rhode Island artists – all focusing in some way on the state’s most precious resource, Narragansett Bay – will be on display through Dec. 27 in Providence. I’ll have more this Thursday in the paper and online.

While the Save The Bay show emphasizes the bay’s scenery, biodiversity and variety of moods (in all seasons, types of weather and times of day and night), an exhibition at the Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery at Salve Regina University in Newport goes for something deeper. Titled “Ocean States,” and curated by Ernest Jolicoeur, the gallery’s new director, the exhibition showcases five Rhode Island-based artists responding to the sea.

Two installations stand out. The first, at the entrance, is a companion to the exhibit – Bert Emerson’s “A Day at the Beach,” a large-scale construction of found objects, glass, wood, plastic and aquarium filters transformed into something that on first glance appears culled from the mad scientist’s laboratory in “Young Frankenstein.” (The one where Igor, played by Marty Feldman, dropped the first brain, so he took the one belonging to “Abby someone…Abby Normal.”)

Emerson’s inventive installation contains 75 items, representing a fraction of nearly 1,000 pounds of trash, everything from those ubiquitous crushed Styrofoam Dunkin’ Donuts cups to fishing lures and SpongeBob SquarePants novelties, collected during a local beach cleanup in September. The piece is a collaboration with Clean Ocean Access, an organization whose mission focuses attention on the cleanliness and safety of the water at the Rhode Island coast and issues of public access. COA provides a weekly program that tests levels of unseen contaminated water in our shore areas. While people are sometimes warned about contamination, the sea life of Narragansett Bay doesn’t have the option of closing the beach. COA’s idea, according to the artist, is to make “the invisible visible,” which is what Emerson has done here with his provocative and labor-intensive artwork.

The other eye-grabber is “Waveform 1,” a kinetic sculpture by Mikhail Mansion and Will Reeves, made of steel, wood, aluminum and stainless steel, that mimics the undulating quality of ocean water. The contrast between the construction’s hard materials and its fluid action is disorienting and visually engaging, all the more so since the rhythmic accompanying sound here is not sloshing water but the mechanized noise associated with engineering (echoing the age of steam). Positioned in the center of the gallery, the installation is 100-by-128-by-120 inches in size, and demands attention throughout the visit. The mechanical wave rises and falls from a battery of overhead controls that include pulleys and wires, gears and cams, turning metal and wood into the shape and motion of a jellyfish. Thus the wave, as the primal act of the sea, is ingeniously reconsidered here.

Other artists present multiple works. All have their highlights. As a series, Allison Eleanor Bianco’s screen prints featuring grounded and sinking ships in highly saturated colors is a successful blend of the comic and tragic. A staggered fleet of tall ships, tugs, trawlers, tankers, ferries and cruise ships are depicted in their beached or submerging vessel forms at their voyage’s unexpected end. Dramatic color choices and the specificity of each vessel’s design add to the poignancy of works, which resonate with evocations of loss, memory and the ultimate inevitability of all journeys, human and otherwise.

Buck Hastings cultivates surreal scenes using old magazines and oceanographic textbooks, creating dream-like photo-collages inspired by the adventure of deep-sea exploration, while Todd Moore presents large India Ink drawings on paper, immersing viewers in topographic detail along the rocky New England coast. Both artists add to the collective of the re-imagined ocean that cradles Rhode Island (and, by extension, the world beyond). And, with Narragansett Bay pounding the rocks below the Cliff Walk just a few hundred yards away, the Hamilton Gallery is ideally situated to offer the tantalizing bit of sea-smack found in “Ocean States.”

The show ends Wednesday. Hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. tomorrow and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Wednesday.

This week’s question: What is your favorite artwork depicting Rhode Island?