CITE-SEEING

A preview of the IOI OOI New Primitives exhibition installation at BoxHeart opening this week!

NAS, IOI OOI Primitives Digital Composite, 2017 | Images provided by BoxHeart Gallery

Also showing are William DeBernardi and Dale Huffman on the main floor.

DeBernardi’s oil paintings capture unsuspecting people in everyday situations: texting, paying a parking meter, visiting a museum and more. In their examination of what’s in front of them (snapped with cell phone pics!), DeBernardi’s subjects isolate themselves from everything that’s happening around them. Removed from the situation depicted, viewers of the exhibit are left to see human behaviour in totality–the cause and the commentary, the reality and the art–of being who they are: of being, human.

Huffman’s ceramics do not disguise the “personal touch” that formed them. So biographical are the “pressing,” “squeezing” and “gripping” of his vases and tea pots that they all feel like natural extensions of the human body itself. That a tea bowl would fit in your palm perfectly, or that a teapot handle attracts the natural place for your hand to land, instinctively. Huffman is willing to let the materials and the process speak for themselves, of which they do in volumes! If DeBernardi’s paintings are about emptying feeling out (and into the gallery!) then Huffman’s ceramics is about filling it up; Ooi’s (that’s me!) paper artifacts, inventing it anew by exploring from where it all began.

IOI OOI New Primitives and William DeBernardi and Dale Huffman run from August 22 through September 22, 2017.