Opens on a Saturday night!

Reception: Saturday, September 14, 6 - 9 pm

Artists' Talk @ Noon on Saturday the 14th

Green Street presents paintings by Erin O'Brien and sculpture by Sally Moore. Erin O'Brien dwarfs us with large, sweeping views of massive mechanical and technological frameworks that bristle with intense coloration. Sally Moore lets us tower beside her delicate acrobatic suspensions of natural materials such as wood, paper and twine combined with transparent and translucent planes. In each artists work, the viewer's awareness of scale and viewpoint reinforces the architectural metaphors in the work. O'Brien admits "I want the paintings to be both inviting and a bit reluctant, to reveal their full contents slowly... Pure optical pleasure is important to me: the flicker and spatial ambiguities that color can achieve are the places I hope to make the viewer aware of themselves seeing."

Moore explains that "While most buildings begin with a firm foundation where you may enter and make your way upward, my structures are often more about catching you as you fall out of the sky - the fire escape school of architecture." She defies gravity by hanging tiny wood armatures and cantilevered forms from the ceiling and dangling weights and springs from one element to support another. Spring loaded and counterweighted, these objects possess both humor and whimsy without losing their sense of precarious tension. The artist's skillful use of scale allows for toy-like movement lending a "Dr. Suess" playfulness to her miniature worlds. Moore uses her own experiences as a source for her elaborately whacky structures saying she, "...employs architectural structure as a metaphor for psychological forces at battle and at play. While the direct source is personal, an internal wrestling with myself, it also speaks of trying to live within structures that we must live in, not the physical ones, but society's rules and expectations as shown through physical

structure."

Sally Moore (L) and Erin O'Brien (R)

O'Brien's says she also thinks her work reveals a bit of what is in her head, explaining, "I have been thinking about the internal structures I create to deal with the world: the rules I live by, the ways I perceive and experience situations. I'm constantly reconfiguring and adjusting these structures as I receive new information, constantly striving to understand myself better and how I fit into the larger world." O'Brien uses the compositional interest and strength of the linear structures depicted to connect us to the actual uses of the cranes, radio telescopes, and trebuchets. This detail allows viewers to discover the metaphorical relationship between these real world machines and the internal mechanisms that we mentally construct. The result is a dynamic landscape of amazing color relationships, buzzing edges and swinging contraptions. - James Hull