Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons: Nesting and Karl Baden: Contact Sheet Self-Portraits

The Cuban-born, Boston-based artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons accosts her viewers with an accusatory solemnity. The way Campos-Pons looks out from her self-portraits reminds me of how Frida Kahlo stares out of hers; the two artists both use the self-portrait as a vehicle for complicated meditations on maternity, pain and nationality. In "Nesting I" (2000), four large-format Polaroids set side by side, the two photographs in the middle show the artist with her eyes calmly shut, her face decorated with yellow and green paint, her shoulders and neck with cruel scratches. The wooden bird perched upon her head in both pictures looks robotic and menacing; since the bird she chose is native to New England, I wondered if the photographs represent an intersection of Cuba and Massachusetts that Campos-Pons perhaps has trouble reconciling. In the two outer photographs, the birds gaze out quizzically, as if asking you why you're so troubled by their treatment of the patient figure of the artist.

The exploded "Contact Sheet Self-Portraits," by the local photographer Karl Baden, depict storms of skin, dissociated from their normal facial placement and set against blank sky backgrounds. Each picture in the set of 35 on each contact sheet shows a minute part of Baden's face. Baden rearranges these segments-mouth, nose and eyes repeat in a row, are wrongly placed, or are not there at all. In one portrait, the flesh pulls and pushes apart like an epidermal big bang. Another print plays on the truism that "no man is an island," shoving all the flesh into the center of the sheet and leaving the mouth open in pain, while the sky, which this time reads more as ocean, serenely surrounds the chaos. With their distortions, these prints speak about issues of identity, lack of personal agency and intense self-examination, and their conclusions don't look cheerful.