Exploring Space at the George Billis Gallery

There's a trio of artists on display at the George Billis Gallery who all seem to be connected by the theme of space. Yong Sin, Josh Dorman and Nick Terry flirt with the idea of breathing room in their art and since the three of them are sharing the same exhibition, there is no official title for the show. But that didn't stop the crowds from attending opening night Saturday.

Yong Sin's De/Form is a series of repetitious shapes and patterns. Her Circle No. 174 is a giant ring composed of tiny squares, and the precision with which each piece is done is enough to make a viewer do a double take.  

"If the viewers find my work interesting," Sin said, "they react very similarly. 'Keep moving, keep clustering' or 'Are you nuts?' If the viewers find my work not interesting then they would say, 'I like the colors' or just smile."

At opening night, fans surrounded Sin. She mentioned that she had a fascination with patterns while she was growing up in South Korea; her mother and grandmother would sit under a quilt and work for hours, and eventually the patterns would begin to emerge before her eyes.

Her work has a tendency to transform, "from first glance to the second look," she said. When this reporter looked at her work, the patterns did have a different appearance upon observing them more than once.

Also on display was Josh Dorman's Look the Other Way. Although Dorman was not present at the gallery, he talked to Patch about allowing his daughters to join in his artistic fun.

"There are only chance events, never mistakes," Dorman said. "I have twin 2-year-old daughters, and sometimes I work at home. I challenge any visitor to the show to find the several places where Alice and Mia grabbed brush and ink and went at it."

Dorman often uses old maps and atlases for his canvas, cutting out illustrations from encyclopedias and placing them on top of one another. The end result is a vivid depiction of the world and the wild.

"For a while, I was obsessed with presenting a clear dichotomy between nature and human creation, such as architecture, gears, machinery, etc.," he said of his earlier work. "I was striving for a quieter space."

Completing the show's trio was Nick Terry's Watercolors. There's no empty space for Terry's work—entire pages were composed of blue or red paint. The absence of breathing room was probably the most jarring, leaving me and the rest of the patrons to peer closer, as though there were something moving below.

The exhibit at the George Billis Gallery will be on display until Oct. 23.