Her Name Is Zsuzsanna Szegedi


At the Fourth Wall Project, you can watch this tree vanish before your very eyes.

Okay, so the Sox are out of town this weekend, hopefully to beat the tar out of the Blue Jays…but this Friday, there’s a great reason for anyone interested in the arts to linger on Brookline Avenue. In case you haven’t heard of the Fourth Wall Project, it’s the gallery opened by the same guys at Bodega, the Back Bay streetwear mecca sought out by hipsters worldwide. Cool store, but even cooler that they’ve used their success to create a 3,000-square-foot open space for local artists to stretch out and explore their vision. And this month that artist is multimedia whiz Zsuzsanna Szegedi, whose opening reception takes place the same time as Big Papi should be swinging for the fences up in Toronto.

An instructor at MassArt (she’s also an alumna), Szegedi has exhibited her paintings at the Copley Society on Newbury Street, at Fruitlands in Harvard, and the Danube Museum in her native Hungary. But it’s her performance and video work that has been a steadily growing presence here in the Hub, with audience participation an intriguing facet of the process. Last year at the Mazmanian Gallery, her Roots and Branches exhibit featured a huge graphite wall drawing of an intricate tree figure that was then erased at the end by Framingham State art students — all of which was documented in time-lapse video to show the creation and subsequent decay of art. Then during this year’s Boston CyberArts Festival, she created Trace with Me at sübSamsøn on Harrison Avenue: After recording two pens drawing on a sheet paper and projecting their movements as dots of light, the viewer could follow along.

For those who missed it, Trace with Me makes another appearance here at Fourth Wall, which is hosting a Szegedi collection called Temporal Works; other video and sculptural work will be on display as well. But the highlight will be a new work, Erase with Me, where Szegedi will create a huge work on Fourth Wall’s storefront windows — taking days to complete, but only hours to wash away, which will be done by the audience on June 24th. All of this would seem more process than aesthetics, except for the fact that the heart of these works are Szegedi’s moodily evocative drawings and paintings of the natural world, so seeing them grow and disappear on time-lapse is particularly astonishing. Come the 24th, the Sox will be in Pittsburgh playing the lowly Pirates anyway, so it’ll be much more fun to have your chance take part in some excellent art.

Temporal Works, by Zsuzsanna Szegedi, is on display until June 26 at the Fourth Wall Project, 132 Brookline Ave., Boston. The opening reception is this Friday, June 10, from 6-9 pm.