Peter Scott: Sketchbook Scans

Robert Siegelman: Cease Fire

February 2 - 24 at Gallery NAGA

In February, Gallery NAGA presents two Boston-based artists, both of whom are making innovative departures in their work.  The well-known printmaker Peter Scott shows new digital prints, both straightforward and manipulated, of images in his private sketchbooks.  The photographer and printmaker Robert Siegelman shows for the first time a new series of multiple-image narrative photographs. 

Peter Scott: Sketchbook Scans and Robert Siegelman: Cease Fire both run from February 2 through 24.  A reception for the artists and the public will be held at the gallery on Friday, February 2 from 6 to 8 pm.

Peter Scott credits his hectic lifestyle for forcing his work into his sketchbooks.  Traveling weekly from his home in western Massachusetts to his teaching at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and traveling nationally and internationally for print projects, he says, “A lot of my work was in sketchbooks.  I essentially started doing paintings in my sketchbooks and not wanting to rip pages out.”

The solution suggested itself as he used a digital printer to enlarge preliminary drawings for a large six-panel print, The View Over Canaan, an aerial view of the Museum School; he could scan his sketchbook.  “It’s an organic window frame across the fold of the book, and it also gives me a way to make a kind of panorama you can’t see except as a scan,” he explains.  In the three-part Sketchbook: Veranda, White River, Scott combines three side-by-side views, looking out through the veranda, that were executed at different times and appear on different pages of the sketchbook.  “With the scan, I can stretch and tweak so that they become one continuous image.”

Scott’s work has been shown in this country and in Europe and has been collected recently by the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium and the Boston Athenaeum.

Most of Robert Siegelman’s photographs of the past ten years, showing individuals and couples suffused with longing and desire, have been made as large-format Polaroid images, employing one of the four very large Polaroid cameras in the country that produces 24x20” images.  Recently, he’s turned to digital printing, in part to use the printing options this provides, in part, as he says, “to start working out in the world, in other people’s environments.  The Polaroids were essentially studio pieces.”

The recent results are works combining multiple images.  Some are juxtapositions of images from diverse contexts; some are successive exposures from a single shoot.

“These are pictures of men in a little different way,” Siegelman offers.  “They’re less overtly sexual, although there’s definitely a sexual undertone.  I think of them as looking at charged moments - sexual moments, relational moments, psychological moments.  Another choice for the title of the show was Still Films.  Not film stills, pieces of something larger, but little films in themselves, small complete movies.”

Siegelman’s photographs and prints have been collected by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Fogg Art Museum, and other major public collections in this region.