reading between the dots & lines

Ever walk into a place & are stunned to find that what you see is exactly what you needed to see right at that moment? Kristin Zottoli & Barbara Minot's show at Through the Music Gallery was just what the doctor ordered, as far as I was concerned. 

Kristin Zottoli's gorgeous small scale textured drawings & constructions invite you to get up close & peer into them, & beg to be touched. Zottoli uses materials she finds around her in her daily life, such as tiny mosaics made with diced paint chip samples that create small, studded drawings within delicate & detailed assemblages. Inspired by her work with the blind, her pieces often include braille paper & raised surfaces. She records landscapes while driving, drawing without looking down at the paper & blindly recording her navigations, the resulting sinuous lines a beautiful tracing of her path. What better metaphor for life?

Beautifully complimenting each others' work, Kristin shared the gallery with fellow artist & map maker Barbara Milot, whose wonderful, contemplative works incorporate ink, watercolor, wire, thread, metal & drawings juxtaposed on empyrean photographs of water & air.

Barbara's interest lies in the contrast of the natural & manmade; uncontrollable forces paired with systems created to contain & structure, & immense spaces depicted in an exaggeratedly small scale. As she explains in her artist's statement:

As maps impose an interpretation and organization on the environment, my linear wire configurations impose an unrelated diagram on the spaces depicted in the photographs. I want the original images to be disturbed, and the meanings altered, by the superimposed structures.

Through the Music Gallery always has something inspiring & worth seeing; I feel very fortunate that we have them in our community.