INTERIOR

INTERIOR
BY ERIC AHO
Tayloe Piggott Gallery is pleased to present Interior, an exhibition of paintings by artist Eric Aho, on view in the project space from July 29^th through September 19^th. In this new body of work Aho vividly captures abstract scenes of the natural world. Each piece features vestiges of actual places, each unearthed, reshaped and compelled by memory and invention.
The rapids and falls, themselves disturbances and disruptions, move

over and around accumulated debris in nature as in life.
Aho consistently places himself in the middle of a river, at the juncture of an interruption. This isn't a coincidence. The stream, to him, represents a steady succession of events, a procession of time, whose confluence is ultimately our own consciousness. We bring to it whatever matters most at the very moment. The rapids and falls, themselves disturbances and disruptions, move over and around accumulated debris in nature as in life.
As writer Tim Weed describes, in Aho’s work, “A vibrating current of electricity dwells just behind everything in nature and the encounter with the painting, like [an] encounter with [a] trout, links you to that current, if only for a fleeting instant. A connection is made between you and something larger. Something important and true.” Within each painting, Aho brilliantly captures the dichotomy of being in the wilderness, feeling connected to the environment and at the same moment disrupting the natural setting.
Each piece captures immensities made intimate; each painting is an attempt to wrangle time and reality. In his artist’s statement, Eric Aho asks us to take a moment: “Standing before a canvas, like standing in the woods, is much the same. It takes a moment for the eye to adjust to less light in the forest as much as it does to quiet the mind. Is this what Whitman meant by “unminding”—to just look without disturbance?”
Born in Melrose, Massachusetts, Aho studied at the Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design in London, England and then received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, MA. Aho has exhibited throughout the United States and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions were held at New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT, the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH, the Federal Reserve Board, Washington, DC, and the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, among others.