OHT Gallery Boston

Previous Exhibits

Spare: Works on Paper

Marilu Swett, Elizabeth Marran, Ben Snead, Louise Marshall, Sarah Sutro & John O'Connor

December 2 - 20, 2003
Reception: Friday, December 5, 5:30 - 7:30 pm

O·H+T gallery is pleased to present Spare, an exhibition of works on paper by Marilu Swett, Elizabeth Marran, Ben Snead, Louise Marshall, Sarah Sutro, and John O'Connor. Though diverse in style and subject matter, the works in this show are limited in color and are direct in their imagery. All works are presented unframed.

Marilu Swett's drawings are related to her sculpture. They occupy the page solidly with simple, strong, linear and organic shapes. Some of the drawings, composed of sandwiched sheets of vellum, have a sense of shallow space, with bolder shapes on the top sheet occupying the foreground.

From her portfolio "Trust Me," Elizabeth Marran's etchings begin her ongoing narrative on the twisted nature of everyday life. These prints combine Marran's own psychoanalytical doodles with images retrieved from an old science text to create bizarre, figurative dramas.

Ben Snead's black marker drawings on white paper continue his investigation of pattern, classification, and order, using naturalistic wildlife imagery. In these drawings Snead looks at the negative spaces created by the overlapping geometric patterns of his obsessively repeated images.

Modestly simple, Louise Marshall's narrow, monochromatic paintings of braided hair are mildly disturbing. Hanging down from the top of each painting the braids are isolated and abstracted, but not enough to dispel questions about the owner's identity and history.

Having recently returned from two years in Bangladesh, Sarah Sutro's small paintings, made with natural dyes on handmade paper, are the by-product of her experiences there. Stark, flooded landscapes and juxtaposed expanses of water and sky, are invoked by her fluid minimal forms and rich earthy colors.

John O'Connor's drawings are complex schematic diagrams of idiosyncratic systems and patterns. Despite their obsessive use of repetition, they are spare in their choice of materials and direct in their presentation.