OHT Gallery Boston

Previous Exhibits

12 and Under

Small Works by: Jeffrey Bishop, Benjamin Gardner, Peik Larsen, Marie Watt, Laura Sharp Wilson

November 29 - December 21, 2002
Reception: Friday, December 6, 5:30 - 7:30 pm

This exhibition brings together the work of 5 artists who consistently work in a small format.

Jeffrey Bishop paints on digital printouts of his father's posthumous brain scans. The common, comfortable scale of these business letter sized pieces does not prepare the viewer for the power of their imagery and content. As Bishop documents the loss of his father's memory and health to Alzheimer's Disease, he also records his own pain and frustration. Strong gestural marks and poured shapes contrast with the unemotional, photographic images of his father's ravaged brain.

Benjamin Gardner's paintings are also about memory. Charmed by his recollections of the toys and eccentric "contraptions" made by his father and grandfather, he paints what he calls "stubborn inventions." These simple, thickly painted works depict flat, oddly-shaped forms that fit together like children's blocks or puzzles. The colors are a comfortable but not boring. Wintery greys and browns are livened up by a bit of raspberry red or sky blue. Painted on stretched pieces of "sensible" fabric, these works have a slightly surreal, "we're not in Kansas anymore," homeyness.

Peik Larsen's new paintings and prints continue his investigation of tree forms and their relationships to one another and the surrounding space. The new paintings are starker than previous work, as Larsen paints out surrounding forms to leave a few stoically standing tree shapes. The prints are etchings that have been overprinted with wood blocks to leave a spare weaving of sinuously curving trunks with fragments of the underlying linear forms peeking through.

Laura Sharp Wilson's obsessive, botanical paintings depict a world gone awry. Flat, textural fields provide a backdrop / environment for the invasive growth of her intricately painted vegetation. Shifting between decorative florals and flat silhouettes, the paintings suggest strange landscapes seen from the point of view of a bug. These painting should be pretty, but the slightly off color and vaguely carnivorous plant life make them more troubling than attractive.

Marie Watt's crow quill ink drawings rely on the delicate, irregular strength of her pen lines to tell stories of human rituals and everyday objects. Drawn to the overlap of art and craft her drawings have the functional simplicity of a weaving or a clay pot. They are spare in information and color, yet familiar in their vocabulary, and strong in their reliance on the relationship between part and whole.