3AM: Under the Full Moon
Work by Christopher Romer

(October 17-November 15, 2009)

Artist Talk and Tea this Sunday, November 15th 3-6pm

Join us for a fun casual chat with Christopher Romer this Sunday on the last day of his exhibit.
While your at it, enjoy some tea, treats, and good company!

Christopher Romer’s new exhibit, 3AM: Under the Full Moon, includes an entirely fresh collection of pieces.  Representing a California debut for the artist, the show consists of a series of works—each one an autonomous piece—that read as a kind of landscape or strange world when grouped together.

The new collection also plays on the total volume notion: objects are suspended from the ceiling, attached to the walls, and placed on the floor, as if the viewer were floating through an aquarium or staring into a tidal pool.  Bill Van Siclen of the Providence Journal recently hailed Romer’s skill as a craftsman and finesse as an artist when he wrote: “Romer manages to cross a number of hotly contested art-world boundaries — between art and craft, painting and sculpture, abstraction and realism — without breaking a sweat.”  And Romer does not let up here: one of the two floor pieces, titled “The Woods are Full of Them,” resembles a very large hobbyhorse or confidence decoy, which has been rolled in on wheels. The viewer is at once met with a California redwood burl, married to a number of painted, turned masses of New England beechwood.  The burl’s once rough and jagged edges—the inheritance from a logger’s cuts years ago—have been smoothed over and filled in, added to and subtracted from.

There is no specific hint of narrative in this piece, but somehow we read a landscape in it—or more precisely a pondscape with lily buds springing from the tuber root and its surrounding, swirling ecosystem.  From one vantage point, this is indeed a pondscape.  Yet taking a few steps back, we now tell ourselves it could be some nameless corporal form—the bulk and flesh of it suggesting an arresting, dozing farm animal.