Ommatidium

Creativity Explored’s current show Repetition, curated by Eric Larson, brings together eight artists whose work explores recursive patterns, subtle revisions and multiple variations on a theme. The signature work of the exhibition greets you right at the door, John Patrick McKenzie’s beguiling hand-lettered piece bordering on op-art and begging for a pair of 3-D glasses to set the colored characters to dancing.

Marilyn Wong’s marker renderings on linen at first struck me as facsimiles of the kind of aerial photography that archaeologists use to identify buried foundations intersecting with crop lines. The series title, Anatomy and Physiology, though forced me to see the globules of hatched lines and strings of beaded circles with fresh eyes. The amorphous soft bodies seem to deform and bustle in some unseen medium, their structures laid bare for scientific inspection.

The other artist who captured the lion’s share of my attention was Jose Nunez. The feathers of his Fourteen Birds and Twenty-One Birds form cape-like swoops as if they huddle together against a driving wind. Their sloping bodies coming to little peaks look like a mountain range glimpsed in the gloaming.