Heather Hobler-Keene paints with a keen eye for color and form. In the past, she has explored the world of commercially reproduced images -- from art catalogues to fashion magazines -- abstracting the images she found with a minimalist’s sensitivity to the essence of the thing observed. Painting on small wooden panels, she would dot candy-colored surfaces with floating, tiny abstracted images. In the brand new body of work on view at the gallery, the artist extends her interest to the three-dimensionality of her wooden panels and the interplay among the shapes she invents on them by physically cutting the work into shaped, painted elements and arraying them playfully on the wall. The three-dimensionality of the work also foregrounds her interest in positive and negative space, and the emphasis she places on both the missing as well as the seen in her art. As she describes two installations on view in the gallery: "Rover Red and Guilt Green are installations constructed from many small paintings. Each small form painting is able to exist unaccompanied or assembled in group conversation offering new possibilities with each installation. The square paintings... bring together absence, movement and space while still using their surroundings. Human emotions, process and materials all influence my work. The repetitive, slow, and patient physicality of my work allows for reasoning, anxiety, and passion. This process of time provides for distillation of details leaving only the essential."

Hobler-Keene graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1997, and her work has been exhibited in "Twice Born: Beauty" at the Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, in "Blue," juried by MFA curator Cheryl Brutvan at the Cambridge Art Association. Her work is in the collection of the Ritz Carlton Boston Common.

Meredith Cutler works with a multitude of materials, ranging, as she describes it, "from the suspicious: kitchen and bathroom plastics, hair, studio debris; to the traditional: papers, fibers, acrylics; to the latest in technology: digital photography and projections." In her newest series of mixed-media collages, she explores images used to symbolize biological processes. The way these complex processes are simplified for dissemination fascinates Cutler, who populates her works with a set of characters loosely based on sub-cellular and chromosomal imagery, evoking a wealth of associations and narratives for the viewer. Drawing with embroidery thread on a woven ground, Cutler also explores the imperfection of the drawn line, as we experience it in poor digital resolution or the earliest video arcade games.

ALLSTON SKIRT GALLERY is located at 450 Harrison Avenue, #303, Boston, MA. We are open Wednesday - Saturday, from 11 a.m. - 5 p.m. For more information, please call Randi Hopkins or Beth Kantrowitz at 617-482-3652.

Please note: the gallery will be open by appointment only in July, and closed during August.

www.allstonskirt.com