Through highly detailed drawings and paintings, Free Parking presents realistic and magic-realistic studies of buildings, transportation systems and social issues that define familiar and fictional urban environments. Few of the works on display include human figures, however each of them suggests the presence of humans as creators, consumers, travelers and, ultimately, temporary visitors. The artists in Free Parking have shown their work across North America, Europe and the Middle East, but this is the first time all four are parked in the same lot.
About the Artists
Yossi Veissid is an Israeli architect and artist who acknowledges human anxiety and despair, but transforms them in his detailed meditations on beauty, harmony and renewal. This will be Veissid's last American exhibition before he relocates to Israel in October. Each of the artist’s ink drawings in Free Parking presents a facet of the human desire to sustain social order. In Nest, for example, we see a minute civilization responding to needs that have become layered and increasingly complex over time. At first glance the work appears amorphous, but upon closer inspection its minute details reveal an inner harmony of human effort. Amidst manic construction we see the civilization’s only tree encased and protected, cargo approaching, and a clutch of egg-like stones that will always exist but never hatch.
Jack O'Hearn IV earned his BFA from the Art Institute of Boston and quickly gained a reputation for producing urban trompe l'oeil paintings that critics have praised as arresting meditations on everyday objects and "salutes to the lowbrow and the overlooked." O’Hearn’s paintings in Free Parking continue along those lines by presenting the visual integrity of mass-produced, highly utilitarian objects. Among them, in Siamese #1, is a plumbing fixture commonly found (but seldom noticed) on the outside of modern office and apartment buildings. O’Hearn defines its context, history, physical state and significance with the type of care used by portraitists. Beauty is something we unknowingly walk past every day.
Kate Sullivan, a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art, could be defined as an urban portraitist by her highly realistic drawings and paintings that capture not just the physical appearance of city buildings and vehicles, but also an essence that makes each of them distinct. In her drawing Buses of Truth Sullivan presents three vehicles, each from a different time and once of service to school children and to people going to everyday or more exotic destinations. Now silent and motionless, the buses – like the artist’s renderings of buildings and trains – possess a unique dignity. Here, however, they also remind us that, no matter how vital, everything eventually outlives its usefulness.
Vanessa Ly graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in architecture, a discipline that imparts sharpness and clarity to her mostly black-and-white drawings. In her work now on exhibit, Ly uses her skills to pass wry commentary on mass consumption and the state of our urban environment. In works such as Rubbish, manufactured and naturally occurring refuse commingle to form the very ground upon which we stand. In this work and others, human debris is represented by giant candy, which is mass produced, readily available and ultimately useless on such a grand scale.
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