ART REVIEW

Mapping the Way at SEABA Gallery

Just before Oakledge Park on Flynn Avenue in the South End crouches a cluster of former industrial buildings housing a myriad of businesses. Nestled there is the office of the South End Arts and Business Association (SEABA), which has brought area residents the South End Art Hop for the past decade and a half.

Through June Art Walkers can view “Mapping the Way”, a group show featuring works by Janet Van Fleet, Gillian Klein, Peter Fried, Sandra Mudge and Jessica Hatheway. Maps, blueprints: a generally cartographic theme unites the works hanging in ample natural light on the exposed and much-repurposed brick walls of the gallery space.

Just as bricked-in doorways and previous interior configurations marking the walls tell a story of multiple uses over the building’s years, so, too, Jessica Hatheway employs maps as canvas, painting over and around them in her collection on display.

Untitled-2 (36” x 28”; acrylic and pumice, glass lens, MDF; 2007) is a triptych in wood-framed panels. Looking out from the rightmost panel’s upper half is a four-inch lens revealing a fraction of the map underneath the surface. The aqua-blue acrylic suggests the topographic features of the hinted-at geography below. Stretching and moving along features now hidden under thickly stippled paint, the shapes form constellations swirling around the planetary, spherical lens.

Untitled (32” x 32”; acrylic and pumice on canvas; 2007) similarly suggests a skyscape, the heavy grain of pumice crowding the bottom of the canvas like trees on a boulevard, a blue and white moon rising stage-right into the cloudy vault above. Paint and pumice stretch from the canvas toward the viewer in thousands of tiny brush-created waves.

LEE FREEMAN

 

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