Boston gallery report

Warning: this is a long post!  We've been snowed in here in Boston, so I've had a lot of time to ponder my computer screen today.  There are some fabulous exhibitions on view in Boston's South End that I heartily recommend.  Since my studio is in the same building as all of these galleries, I usually feel like I see the shows just by walking around the neighborhood and by the sheer osmosis of being in the same location.  Sometimes, though, it's good for me to go door to door with my camera and really look. 

Over at OSP Gallery, a group show of gallery artists was still up on the walls while they were working on the layout of their next show: Zooid, graphite drawings by Bay Area artist Tara Tucker.   

My favorite OSP artist, David X. Levine, was well represented by an enormous drawing executed entirely in pencil.  Levine has such a masterful, intuitive sense of color and forms.  Did I mention that every bit of orange was done by hand with colored pencil??!

On the adjacent wall, there are paintings by Mark Sheinkman (on the left) and Jill Moser (on the right), and three of the Tara Tucker drawings, still wrapped up. 

Tucker and I are clearly tapping into the same idea (or drinking the same kool-aid, some might say), since her work portrays hybrid creatures formed by the merging of species and of plants and animals, as does mine.  I have to admit to freaking out slightly when I first saw her work, since it is so similar to mine, but I also appreciate someone else's window into the same subject matter.  I think there will only be graphite-on-paper drawings at the OSP show; her show at Rena Bransten Gallery in 2007 also featured sculptures of tree-sheep, which you can see here.  This is one of the drawings that will be up at OSP:

Tucker's solo show at OPS Gallery opens on January 17, with an opening reception on the first Friday of February.  Definitely a not-to-be-missed show.

Over at OH+T, there is a 4-person group show of new works on paper by David Kelley, Chris Nau, Mark Lawrence Stafford, and Conor McGrady.  (Side note: their next show, the artist Nick Z, is titled "Today's Pig is Tomorrow's  Bacon."  The title alone warrants a visit to that one!)  Stafford types the phrase "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" on a real, old-fashioned typewriter, to this dream-like effect:

David Kelley's drawings are a perennial crowd favorite, and these are no exception.  They are fun, clever, and thoughtful (all the while seemingly tongue-in-cheek) meditations on that space between what goes on in our heads and what actually comes out of our mouths.  They have a spontaneity that calls to mind automatic drawing.  And it doesn't hurt that they remind me a bit of Guston and Carroll Dunham.

Conor McGrady's stark gouache-on-paper drawings tackle issues of power and authority in society:

Chris Nau's minimalist panels have drawings that are then cut into, portraying the collision of forms and forces:

Next door to OH+T at Julie Chae Gallery, there is a smart two-person show of recent MFA grads Natasha Bowdoin and Alexander DeMaria.  Titled "Myths and Fables," this show pairs two artists who are fascinated by the possibilities of paper: not just to be drawn or painted on as a substrate, but cut up, reassembled, sculpted, draped... all in a bold, exuberant way.

Natasha Bowdoin:

Alexander DeMaria:

   

Finally, Allston Skirt Gallery has mounted a spectacular three-person painting show, called Strangefolks, with one of my favorite painters, Elizabeth Huey, along with John Copeland and Logan Grider.  Each of the artists offers a vision of a world (their inner world? an apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic one?) that is fragmented and chaotic, with an order that is understandable only to its own own creator.  Huey's paintings are the most figurative of the bunch, filled with open-ended narrative elements.  Grider's paintings, like David Kelley's at OH+T, have a touch of Guston to them, with piles of accumulated elements, some recognizable, some inscrutable.  Copeland's paintings are lush and beautiful, but also disturbing and, again, possessed of a narrative vague enough to to keep us guessing.

Elizabeth Huey:

 

John Copeland:

Logan Grider:

All in all, there is a good batch of shows in the South End.  I'm sure I missed good stuff elsewhere, but now it's time to get cracking on my own work to meet two big end-of-the-month deadlines.  If only it would stop snowing...