lost in space: britt oman's world of flat dimensionality

Britt Oman is a personal friend, which makes it a bit sketchy of me to write about her and her recent gallery opening, Personal NOT Precious. I could easily face accusations that I'm just a puff writer trying to improve the profile of my friends and colleagues. I feel compelled to write, however, because this is some of her best and most accessible work, and I say that as someone who often has a difficult time connecting to purely abstract art.

Can shape have an emotion? Probably not. But what if you put it with other shapes in front of and behind it? Maybe. Abstract artists have been working this way for quite some time, but there's a newness to Britt's paintings that comes from their viscerality. Frank Stella worked with line and its relationship to shape, too, but his work is clean and careful, the antithesis of the almost violent combinations that we see in this show. These paintings use not only the canvas but also the floor, wall, the ceiling, the empty space around them, and even other paintings to distort the expectations of looking. They also combine the raw stroke of the paintbrush with the printmaker's clean and pressed line for an almost alien contrast.

Britt's work is a kind of painted collage. Whether it's painted to the wall to create confusion between the painting and the gallery space or created from cut fragments of paintings that we've seen before (thus distorting our perception of time as well as of space), everything here is about combination.

We talked a bit in her artist's talk about her process and her willingness to second-guess herself. She said that she works intuitively, responding to what's in front of her, but also always starts with a template, usually a print. This helps in understanding why the work comes out the way that it does and helps with the more conceptually minded who might be overwhelmed with the attack of formalism seen here. But, if pressed to the wall and forced to give a concern rather than a compliment, I'd have to say that the one thing this show could really use is a binding conceptual theme. Personal NOT Precious for some reason doesn't quite do it for me. The loud and hot nature of the art makes me want a feeling or an emotion to think about as I get lost in the whirlwind. It's a minor concern, however, and I enjoyed the show in spite of it.

There's plenty more going on than I've been able to articulate. The feeling of fragmentation underlies a lot that's found here, but again, it feels secondary to spacial disorganization. The tension between front and back, square and broken square, also squeaks in. This is a big jump for Britt, and it'd be a mistake to skip it.

Personal NOT Precious runs through February 18 at the Gallery Vault, which is located at 708 W St. Germain in St. Cloud.

puzzle and mirror: infinite field at gallery st. germain

With a puzzle, not only are pieces expected to combine properly, but also, they're supposed to make an image of something when you complete the thing. A puzzle seems an apt metaphor for Infinite Field, the recent show at Gallery St. Germain by Peter Happel Christian and David Ruhlman, but an incomplete one. Of course, no self-respecting fine artist would conceive of their work as a puzzle with a specific meaning to be figured out by the viewer, but while at the show I couldn't shake the sensation that, more so than with other art exhibitions, this was a puzzle, even one with no specific meaning or answer.

That's probably the influence of David Ruhlman's work. The piece above is The Fox sisters receive the first 12 letters, and is fairly representative of the general tone and feel of the paintings he presented for the show. He mentioned that he became interested in the Fox sisters and their contribution to the development of the American spiritualist movement. His paintings seemed to touch on mystery and its relationship to spiritual awakening, but also incorporated letter-forms as an aesthetic device. His letter grids encourage you to see a word, then bounce to another, then back again, just as gestalt images like the face-vase encourage you to bounce between images.

Several of the paintings are also sculptural, which not only allows, but actually encourages you to view them from multiple angles. At one point I had a strong desire to crawl on the floor to see if there was painted material that I couldn't see standing up or crouching. In the culture of the gallery space and the universal survey museum that sometimes zombifies us into viewing work in one way from one angle, this, I feel, is quite an accomplishment.

Work from another show that's quite similar to the work presented at Infinite Field

I'm more familiar with Peter's work, which is significantly different on the surface. Peter self-identifies as a photographer, and I think it's fair to put him in the more conceptual camp of that medium. His work at this show varies greatly. I saw crisp, black-and-white photographs formally reminiscent of the golden age of black and white photography, but taken of the everyday sawhorse. The black mirror and the black hole are repeating motifs that show up in Peter's work quite a bit, and this show is no exception. Probably the most striking piece of the whole exhibition is Infinite Field IV, a large, table-like structure of Plexiglas held up by two very different sawhorses, with a black glass in the center. The unnatural curvature of the table makes it feel as though it's about to burst, and the black glass serves as an implied mirror for the sawhorses.

It's the theme of this piece that binds the show together, I think. Though the metaphor of the incomplete puzzle makes sense for David's work, and clearly influences Peter's, a better and more well-rounded metaphor might be the imperfect mirror. Most pieces in the show can be viewed as a distorted reflection. Some, like the table with unique sawhorses, reflect themselves. Some reflect other works in the show, as when David titles two different pieces exactly the same. Many reflect your own expectation, such as when we're forced to view what we know to be a flickering light through a black glass, or when we search for words that aren't there in a letter grid.

The imperfect reflection and the black mirror make me think of the modern LCD/LED screen. I've never known either artist to work with technology as a theme, and in Peter's case he sometimes seems to work against it by creating handmade books and photographing natural spaces, but I'd be interested to see what their artistic sensibilities would make of the ubiquitous nature of modern technology.

But I digress. The show comes highly recommended, and I haven't touched on half of what's to be found there after a careful examination. Infinite Field is open through March 5 at Gallery St. Germain, which is located at 912 W St. Germain in St. Cloud. For further questions, the artists can be contacted through their websites, linked in the first paragraph of this article, and Gallery St. Germain can be contacted at studio@paramountarts.org.