First Friday in the South End – August

Last Friday evening I spent several hours in the studios and galleries at the 450 Harrison area of the South End. I came across a surprising number of works that resonated with my interests. Some highlights:

The first maplike works I came across were at Kingston Gallery by Chantal Hardy, in an exhibition called “Current” which was right up my alley. Most of the works they had appeared to be abstracted aerial views of islands, but I was particularly arrested by one piece in which the artist had gone back in and added a framework on top of some of the topography. I have to paste her entire artist statement here because it just sounds so much like my approach:
“A limited palette and a narrow vocabulary of marks in pen and ink on watercolor paper hold infinite possibility. The accretion of tiny, taut tick marks and earth toned dots gives birth to continents and islands, to mountains and shorelines, to highways and harbors. Organic landscapes are bifurcated by cities and geometric, manmade infrastructures. The topography builds itself, like land out of lava, as I scrape the metal nib ad infinitum or allow the pen to linger, bleeding ink into wet paper. This truly is art as an act of creation. Having gone off the map, I am literally making a world.”