OHT Gallery Boston

Previous Exhibits

Amze Emmons

Field Office

March 7 - 29, 2008
Reception: Friday, March 7, 5:30-7:30pm

O·H+T Gallery is pleased to present Field Office, an exhibition of new work from Philadelphia artist Amze Emmons's ongoing, media isolation experiment.

Emmons's process is systematic. He begins by scanning contemporary media sources such as the Sunday edition of the New York Times, on-line news sources, and the websites of international aid agencies, to search for photographs of major world events. The documentary images he chooses depict war zones, disaster sites, scenes of car-bombings, and refugee migrations. With the eye of a cultural scientist, the intuition of an editor, and the tools of a draftsman/painter, Emmons reinterprets and transforms these scenes to highlight unseen truths.

The resulting images are bizarre depictions of bleak, empty rooms, and lifeless landscapes. As if to heighten the peculiarity of his images, Emmons paints some elements in plasticy, pastel colors. In Disruptive Technology (above), a gouache, acrylic and pencil piece on aluminum panel, grey concrete barricades block a street scattered with debris, while a baby pink curb leads to a chink in the barriers. A homely folding table sits on the sidewalk as strings of pennants are silhouetted in a distant, salmon red sky. An appropriate response to this scene could range from humor to horror, while its vague time frame suggests the aftermath of events that have occurred throughout history. Emmons has managed to construct quasi-real, staged environments, where what is missing is as important as what remains, and where key iconography is often hidden in plain sight.

Amze Emmons is a Philadelphia-based artist who lives in Allentown, PA. He has a BFA in Printmaking and Painting from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MFA in Print from the University of Iowa. He has exhibited widely in galleries and museums including Gallery Katz, Boston, Scoula Internationale Di Graphica, Venice, Miami University, Miami Ohio, and at the Aqua Art Miami and Scope Miami art fairs. His work is included in the collections of the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA and the Tama Art University Museum, Tokyo. This is Amze Emmons's first exhibition at O·H+T Gallery.