The seven oversized pieces of “Lumpy Notes” occupy Richardson Plaza, delighting passersby drawn in from Huntington Avenue.
Title: “Lumpy Notes” (2021)
Artists: Adam Frezza and Terri Chiao
Materials: Painted paper pulp, painted wooden plinths
Location: Boston campus Richardson Plaza, 416 Huntington Avenue
About: The seven large, colorful pieces pop up along Richardson Plaza like physical renditions of music, striking a variety of notes as you navigate around them.
“The organic form is generally lumpy,” says Adam Frezza, explaining the installation’s title. “And the notes? We started to think of them musically, like little chimes throughout the corridor here. So it’s almost like visual sounds.”
Terri Chiao and Frezza, whose surnames have been pieced together to form their studio, CHIAOZZA (pronounced “ch-ow-zah”), transformed the plaza into a walkway of playful music over a span of three months in 2021.
“Thinking about the way notes look on a page, the visual tells you it’s music,” adds Frezza. “With this particular courtyard area and the grid of the concrete, and then these pieces fitting within that scale — we were looking at a sheet of [musical] objects in a field.’’
The two artists built the pieces in their Brooklyn studio before transporting them to Boston. Each brightly painted sculpture is formed by recycled paper pulp enveloping a base of sculpted foam and plywood.
The oversized shapes are fun and their colors leap out at you like provocative yet relatable jazz. One piece of organic blue is dappled with bursting orange leaves adorning a large round horseshoe turned lucky side up — with two giant cherries on top.
Complementing it is an arch of aqua and red that appears to be traversed by three lavender balls. Nearby sits an orb of green strips laid this way and that upon a sea of blue while antennae sprout from its top.
“A visual experience has a rhythm and a meter to it,” Chiao says. “When things are slightly off and unexpected, that’s when you start to pay attention.
“If we can get someone to wonder, ‘What is it?’ then that is a good question to translate to many parts of one’s life — to not get too stuck in thinking you know what’s going on, keeping your mind elastic, and being open to looking at things in different ways.”
The installation is especially vivid in the gray days of winter, greeting students, faculty and staff as they pass between the Stearns and Knowles buildings.
“Play is fun and it’s a way to find the lightness of things,” Chiao says. “I think that’s really important for living our lives, and that’s something that I feel like can be shared. It’s sort of a universal thing that everyone does in some way.”