OHT Gallery Boston

Previous Exhibits

Death Camas

Painting and Sculpture
Aaron Williams

May 4 - 26, 2007
Reception: Friday, May 4, 5:30 - 8:00pm

Aaron Williams's work examines both the transition from youth to maturity and the violence sometimes associated with that volatile stage of life. His particular interest is in the ongoing spate of school shootings, and the social and academic pressures that transform marginalized students into killers.

Suffering from moral and physical detachment, the protagonists in these tragic dramas are often struggling to carve out unique personal territories. Williams explores these half-real, half-imagined environments through the use of landscape and text. Photographs of the flora and fauna found in the locations where the school shootings have occurred provide visual material, while the writings found in the notebooks of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the Columbine shooters, supply the text. "In creating this world, I've postulated two adolescent travelers, and much of my decision-making process in the studio is an imagined look through their eyes."

View from Littleton (above) is one of a series of works on paper that depict quasi-realistic landscapes. Portions of these scenes are skillfully executed in watercolor, while other are silhouetted in glossy black enamel. Williams uses this stark combination of materials and imagery to create a subtly foreboding netherworld where reality is skewed and relationships are altered.

Williams views his sculpture as "parts of the landscape that my two protagonists travel through, preserved like pieces of dioramas from the Museum of Natural History." Forever consists of a broken sapling painted in gradations of blue and suspended over a broken mirror. It is a disorienting and poignant object that embodies the sense of lonely isolation of these disturbed teenagers, as they follow the dictates of their malformed ideology.

Aaron Williams lives and works in Brooklyn. He has a MFA degree from Rutgers University and a BFA from the Maine College of Art. Williams has exhibited his work nationally and internationally including Baumgartner Gallery and Max Protech Gallery in New York. This is Aaron Williams's first one-person exhibition at O·H+T Gallery.