For more than 10 years, Ott's primary material has been encaustic: pigment dissolved in hot wax that is then brushed, poured or splashed on panels and canvases. Over the past few years, she has increased her palette's aggressiveness, replacing milky whites, rosy reds, honey yellows and soft blues with smoky blacks, strange purples, poisonous greens and caustic oranges.
As a result, wax's natural affinity with flesh and blood gives way to less organic associations with chemical spills and industrial accidents. Plus, Ott's ever-increasing facility with wax gives her often large-scale paintings a sculptural presence. Cut, carved and scraped, the scarred surfaces of these assertive works are equally shaped by addition and subtraction.
In contrast, Ott's current, mostly page-size pictographs are delicate and wispy. Although many of these slippery, out-of-sync images are reserved, even tentative, most signal a significant change in the artist's method of thinking. An attractive type of translucence displaces the messy materiality of Ott's earlier works.
Combining letters of the alphabet with maps, diagrams, silhouettes, scribbles and fragments of architecture, her latest images intimate that divergent meanings--not to mention interpretations--overlap and intermingle. Still overshadowed by their sources in Gertrude Stein's poetic prose, Edward Ruscha's precisely articulated images and Jasper Johns' impenetrable enigmas, Ott's promising collages take a step in the right direction.
* Mark Moore Gallery, 2032-A Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through June 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.
