ANNIE HÉMOND HOTTE | GRETTA JOHNSON | ROB POLIDORO: Wandering with a Place in Mind
Past exhibition
Marvin Gardens is pleased to present “Wandering with a Place in Mind,” a three-person exhibition of paintings featuring Annie Hémond Hotte, Gretta Johnson, and Rob Polidoro. This show features a variety of rich and inventive scenes based loosely in the natural world, yet generated almost entirely from the imagination. Polidoro’s invented landscapes slowly reveal light as primary concern. Appearing minimal at first glance, subtle details in highlights, shading, and texture focus on building up gradations of light to define spatial volumes and evoke stillness. Hémond Hotte’s paintings burst forth with patterns and hatch marks and patterned painting- texture as well. This textile-like quality agrees with the lateral compositional arrangement of shapes, insisting on the flat object. The images depicted are more symbolic than rendering. Johnson’s paintings lay somewhere in between these two artists. Her works carry a more psychedelic and fractal quality. The imagination wanders as these paintings seem specific yet are so hard to place. They are graphic yet organic in a biomorphic sense, they appear symbolic yet open, indicate spatial depth yet are flattened by what seems to be light coming from within the painting itself. Indeterminate searching is implied in the title of this exhibition. Wandering can be quite a rare and relaxing phenomenon in this time of ever-accelerating barrages of stimuli. One could even consider it a method of protest. We invite you to join these artists on this journey, wandering in thought through these meditative images.
