OHT Gallery Boston

Previous Exhibits

Stranger Than Fiction

Matt Siber, Lori Nix, Steve Aishman

April 17 - May 16, 2009
Reception: Friday, May 1, 5:30 - 7:30pm

O·H+T Gallery is pleased to present Stranger Than Fiction, an exhibition of photographs by Lori Nix, Matt Siber, and Steve Aishman, three artists who rely on visual twists and/or double entendres to examine the thin line between truth and illusion.

Lori Nix photographs miniature dioramas built from found objects and everyday materials. These obsessively detailed environments focus on her interest in 1970's disaster movies, and her memories of growing up in Kansas. At first glance, the viewer may be fooled into seeing photographs of real sites, but one quickly realizes that something is wrong and that Nix's scenes are fabrications. All Nix's works are constructed and photographed in the controlled environment of her studio. She never uses digital manipulation or enhancement. Rather, it is the viewer's imagination that enriches the photograph with a subtext of his/her personal experience.

How to Make Super Flowers, Steve Aishman's 8 minute, "You Tube" video, is a homey how-to description of his working process. Like Martha Stewart, Aishman gives helpful hints on how to use simple grafting techniques to create short-lived, mutant plants, each displaying a variety of blooms and leaf types. He then strips the new specimens of their pots and photographs them suspended against a black background, bare roots dangling below. Though these botanical misfits exist in the real world, Aishman digitally edits and enhances the photographs to produce images reminiscent of 17th century, trompe l'oeil still life paintings. The mystery of the photographs is even more perplexing when contrasted with the jovial transparency of Aishman's "anybody can do it" working process.

Matt Siber's digitally altered landscapes differ from the work of Nix and Aishman in that they are photographed from life rather than in a controlled studio environment. In Siber's Floating Logo series, he digitally removes the structural supports from common roadside signage, reorganizing the landscape while forcing us to examine the meaning of these ubiquitous words and corporate symbols. Bits of text, CHEESE, TRUCK WASH, JESUS, BP, McDONALDS, etc., float passively in the sky like editorial comments from above. "Siber's strategic digital manipulations alter our perception of the familiar and the commonplace... We are ultimately asked to consider our complicity in the creation of the hypnotic lullaby of the contemporary landscape." – Nate Larson, Independent Curator