OHT Gallery Boston

Previous Exhibits

New Works on Paper

Meg Alexander, Alex Lukas, Pete Watts,
Debra Weisberg

January 2 - 31, 2009
Reception: Friday, January 2, 5:30 - 7:30pm

O·H+T Gallery is pleased to begin the New Year with our annual Works on Paper exhibition. This year it will include works by Meg Alexander, Alex Lukas, Pete Watts and Debra Weisberg. Though these artists explore a range of imagery using various materials, there is a shared interest in human civilization's relationship with the natural world.

Meg Alexander's elegantly spare drawings are executed with the eye of a scientist and the soul of a philosopher/poet. Alexander, who lives in Concord, home to Thoreau, Emerson and the Transcendentalists, has focused on the evolutionary process of a beaver dam that she has observed while walking in the Estabrook Woods. Her careful studies reveal her interest in the relationship between experience, perception, and memory, and in the way we process events and discoveries to create new experiences.

Pete Watts, a Brooklyn artist, is also interested in natural processes. His small, detailed pencil drawings meticulously depict the "grand unfolding of events" that takes place when the competing forces of man and nature meet. Watts draws our attention to the visual similarities between natural and industrial violence (dynamite mining/volcanic eruptions, draining of wetland/desertification) while meditating on the interconnectedness among all these forces and phenomena.

Philadelphia artist, Alex Lukas explores the proliferation of disaster images, and the role that they play in contemporary American culture. His mixed media landscapes, often on book pages, depict cities sinking into oceans and post-apocalyptic industrial landscapes. As he identifies an increasing lack of distinction between reality and entertainment, he contemplates the effect that a steady diet of catastrophes will have on our national psyche. Ironically, he may have his answer in the current financial crisis.

Boston artist Debra Weisberg's shaped tape drawings are a counterpoint to the other work in the exhibition. Made from layers of torn black and white archival tape, their oozing visceral shapes invade the gallery space with spreading, contoured edges. Magnified neurons or cosmic explosions come to mind, as do the basic physical principles of matter, fluidity, density, metamorphosis, etc. Weisberg's work seems to investigate the forces that are depicted in the work of the other three artists in the exhibition.