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.