BU Art Galleries

Boston University Art Galleries’ Spring 2025 Experimental Exhibitions Explore Landscape, Perception, and Meaning

Trasluz / Translucent brings together the work of longtime friends Michael Zachary and Juan José Barboza-Gubo. Constituent Parts highlights a decade-long conversation between BU MFA alums Cathy Della Lucia (CFA’17) and Nicholas Antony Mancini (CFA’17).

Trasluz / Translucent brings together the work of Michael Zachary and Juan José Barboza-Gubo, where they create immersive environments that blend physical terrain with metaphysical space. In their first exhibition together (and in the city where they studied together), Zachary and Barboza-Gubo explore contemporary circumstances in which nature, technology, and humanity are enmeshed and inseparable. Zachary’s cross-hatched CMYK layering and Barboza-Gubo’s frosted acrylic panels create intricate landscapes that shimmer with complexity, offering spaces of reflection in the age of technology. Curated by Sarah Montross, Trasluz / Transculent is on view from January 23 through March 7 at Boston University’s Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery.

Constituent Parts: Cathy Della Lucia and Nicholas Anthony Mancini in Dialogue challenges how people interpret shape, color, texture, and space, inviting one to slow down and reconsider how we assemble meaning. The exhibition, curated by Phillippa Pitts, highlights a decade-long conversation between Della Lucia (CFA’17) and Mancini (CFA’17), who met as MFA students at Boston University in 2015. Della Lucia’s modular sculptures—crafted from hand-finished wood, 3D-printed silicone, ceramics, and found objects—invite viewers to assemble meaning through tactile interaction, reflecting her personal journey as a sculptor, athlete, and Korean-American adoptee. Mancini explores perception through a unique process of translating images between print, photography, painting, and video. His series of paintings play with the contradictions of depicting three-dimensional space on a flat surface. Constituent Parts is also on view from January 21 through March 7 at Boston University’s 808 Gallery.

TRASLUZ / TRANSLUCENT

Works by Juan José Barboza-Gubo and Michael Zachary

Curated by Sarah Montross

On view at Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery • January 23 – March 7   

At the heart of Michael Zachary and Juan José Barboza-Gubo’s work lies the ever-evolving subject of landscape, which encompasses both the physical terrain and the metaphysical and conceptual underpinnings of space. Both artists relate to landscape in terms of immersion, the sensation of stepping into a forest and feeling physically and psychically merged with it. Despite this intimacy, their work also fosters a kind of distance, as unpassable screens or filters are placed between us and the unknowable organic world.

For Barboza-Gubo, this filter comes from his ingenious use of frosted acrylic panels to blur the nearly iridescent, light-filled vegetal and painterly forms that hover just beneath their surface. His artworks, inspired by repeated travels within the Peruvian rainforest, edge us toward clear focus, but never reveal their inner workings. This process of thwarted looking instills sensations of mystery and desire within our perception of the lush, hazy, and ever-changing forms.

For Zachary, his incredibly refined process of layering cross-hatched lines of CMYK on white surfaces also yields a screen-like space. One way to perceive his artworks is to physically step back. From this distance, we distinguish his cooly animate lifeforms—trees, feathers, vines—as utterly entangled. Zachary’s cross-hatched lines are as interdependent and multitudinous as the leaves on a tree.

Zachary and Barboza-Gubo’s longstanding friendship began while they were classmates at Massachusetts College of Art and Design earning their MFAs. In this, their first exhibition together (and in the city where they studied together), we find two artistic visions that may, at first glance, appear vastly contrasting. Yet their meticulously crafted landscapes shimmer and absorb us. Zachary and Barboza-Gubo explore contemporary circumstances in which nature, technology, and humanity are enmeshed and inseparable. Though the technological immersion that defines our era rarely offers authentic spaces of sanctuary or transparency, Zachary and Barboza-Gubo remind us that the natural world and art remain a refuge for clarification and reflection.

Though the technological immersion that defines our era rarely offers authentic spaces of sanctuary or transparency, Zachary and Barboza-Gubo remind us that the natural world and art remain a refuge for clarification and reflection.

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CONSTITUENT PARTS

Cathy Della Lucia and Nicholas Anthony Mancini in Dialogue

Curated by Phillippa Pitts

On view at 808 Gallery • January 21 – March 7   

The peculiar anatomy of the human eye allows only a small part of our surroundings to be in focus at any given moment. To compensate, our vision shifts rapidly from point to point. Our brain combines this onslaught of raw sensory data with past experiences to produce an image that we can make sense of. We recognize familiar forms and images, even when half-hidden or at oblique angles. We make inferences based on color and shape to build out the world around us. What we ultimately perceive is a balance between new information and old memories; an assemblage of constituent parts that our brain transforms into cohesive meaning.

The works of art in this exhibition challenge our brains’ habitual patterns for interpreting shape, color, texture, scale, and space. Through their experimental approaches to representation, they invite us to slow down and explore our ability to accumulate and assimilate information into understanding.

[left] Pump-king Keeper. Wood, plywood, ceramic, glaze, paint, stain, dye, magnets, varnish. 63 x 19 x 21 in. 2023. Photo by Gregor Hazel [right] Trolling (blue raz). Wood, plywood, glazed ceramic, paint, dye, flocking, resin, silicone, croquet poison stick, varnish, stainless steel fishing rod mount. 24 x 15 x 11. 2024. Photo by Bruce R Wahl

In Cathy Della Lucia’s work, our invitation to assemble meaning comes in the form of modular sculptures that combine laboriously hand-finished wood with 3D-printed silicone, glazed ceramics, laser-etched surfaces, and myriad found objects. The artist uses traditional Japanese joinery techniques to connect these interlocking parts, producing sculptures that swivel, unfold, and can be fully disassembled. By puzzling together evocative shapes, colors, textures, and materials, Della Lucia devises an associative visual language to convey insights from her experiences as a sculptor, a former Division 1 athlete, a Korean-American adoptee, and a woman living in the United States today.

[left] Image Book, oil on canvas, 52” x 54”, 2024. [right] Mirror Object, oil on paper mounted to panel, diptych, 18” x 9.5” overall, 2024

Nicholas Anthony Mancini’s investigation into perception centers on the expectations and traditions that have accrued around specific art forms. Through an iterative process of repeatedly translating images between print, photography, painting, and video, Mancini searches for those accidental artifacts and distortions that make strange our approaches to different media. His two series of paintings on view in this gallery invite us into the artist’s ongoing exploration into the inherent contradictions of depicting three-dimensional space on a flat surface.

Della Lucia and Mancini met as MFA students at Boston University in 2015 and have remained close friends and occasional colleagues. In bringing the work of these two artists into dialogue, this exhibition also offers a window into a decade-long conversation between their makers.

Through their experimental approaches to representation, Della Lucia and Mancini invite us to slow down and explore our ability to accumulate and assimilate information into understanding.

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