OVERLAP is pleased to present two concurrent exhibitions that explore intermediary spaces. The Wall Wanted to Play Too: The Architecture of Tenderness is a solo exhibition of new works by Boston-area artist Jai Hart, while Slip features a selection of works by Rhode Island-based artists Olivia Baldwin and Barbara Owen. Both shows demonstrate affinities for creating relationships between color, shape, and form, embodied through innovative approaches to materiality, depth, and arrangement.

Jai Hart’s paintings simultaneously define and defy borders. Her smartly playful works range from precious and pillowy abstract landscapes to larger-than-life hybrids that mix stretched canvases with soft sculptures. Bands of stuffed and painted material partially frame the work, and then take detours. These soft conduits depart from traditional geometry to capture adjoining sections of the wall, floor, and ceiling as integral elements of her compositions. Hart paints layers with vibrant tints of colors in varying opacities. She overlaps and combines fields of broad gestural strokes with controlled, mesh-like straight lines and murmurations of dots that weave in, out, and between. Many of her works are energetic and dazzling, but she also offers counterpoints with restrained palettes and dreamy, atmospheric areas. The Wall Wanted to Play Too: The Architecture of Tenderness is Hart’s first solo exhibition in Rhode Island.

Olivia Baldwin and Barbara Owen weave color, shape, and line to create work that slips between painting and sculpture. Each artist has a history of rigorous explorations into non-objective formal relationships that is demonstrated in their ability to intuitively compose even scraps of material into pieces that smartly explore space, create tension, and find harmony.

Olivia Baldwin’s recent work stems from using irregularly shaped remnants of dyed leather as raw material. She interweaves spectrums of them, pulling strips taut as she attaches them to stretcher bars with upholstery tacks. The narrowing and curving of the pieces warp the grid and pull colors through in unexpected ways. In other works, presented in the round, the leather is densely entwined around and through supporting structures of sawhorses and modified box springs. In some areas, the pieces are allowed to languidly hang and twist—revealing tonal and textural shifts between the front and back side of the skins.

Barbara Owen also offers works that are enmeshed. In contrast to Baldwin’s raw edges, Owen’s work often features crisp lines and bold, flat shapes. She slices collage elements from hand-painted paper to flesh out a visual vocabulary that includes perpendicular bands of color, grids, elongated oval-shaped contours, and irregular solid masses. Arranged on ambiently painted surfaces, the shapes intertwine and overlap, sometimes appearing to defy gravity as they float in and out and near each other. In other instances, Owen creates these shapes as objects and arranges them on the wall or on pedestals, creating installations and groupings that mirror these investigations into repetition and space. Through their divergent approaches to shared interests, Olivia Baldwin and Barbara Owen’s works enjoy an elevated conversation about process, abstraction, and perception.

-Alicia Renadette, curator