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Indepth Arts News:
"Flat, Square, and on the Wall: Photographs by Peter Harris and Paintings by Adie Russell."
2002-08-16 until 2002-09-20
Fort Point Arts Community Gallery
Boston, MA,
USA United States of America
The FPAC Gallery is proud to present Peter Harris and Adie Russell in a two-person show entitled Flat, Square, and on
The Wall. This is the second show in a season juried by Annette Lemieux.
Peter Harris will be showing 5 large c-prints that continue his exploration of photography as a recording medium and the
photograph as a material object in and of itself. The photographs shown will include cloud/grid, wire, and recent macro
work. This work subverts the narrative/ subject oriented nature of the photograph. There is a push - pull between surface
and depth, background and foreground. The viewer cannot look through the surface to see “a picture of something” but
rather must confront the photograph as an entity.For those of you attuned to the distancing coolness of the Bechers and their
followers this work will be jarring. It is lush vibrant, and challenging. In a review of an earlier show by Harris, John Brister
writes, “ Equipped with a heightened visual expression, no longer are the images as open to interpretation. Their unabashed
persuasiveness is to his credit, an air-conditioning duct glows orange-red as if its heat were sexual...”
Adie Russell’s paintings investigate the tension between order and chaos and the complex systems of logic that separate
the two. Russell uses abstracted shapes reminiscent of organic growth, either proliferating into an allover pattern, or as lush
vegetal entities.Juxtaposed are systems of colored dots, some adhering to and some deviating from the grid. The paintings
become a process of confining and expanding, ultimately searching for the narrow area where one becomes the other...order
vibrates into chaos and back into order again. Ms. Russell's five large paintings, as with Mr. Harris's photographs are not
academic exercises. They are part of a beautiful body of work; richly painted, witty, full of tension.
As a whole, this exhibition is a dialogue between the two artists in their respective media. They use similar devices to
achieve their goals, but these devices operate differently in photography and painting due to the expectations the viewer
brings to each media. The show’s success, apart from the response individual pieces generate, will be in this interplay. -How
the media diverge, where they meet, and whether, in this process, a fresh way of looking is inspired.
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