Upcoming Exhibitions
June 5 - 30, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, June 7, 6-8 pm
Cynthia Roberts
”Suffusion: New Paintings and Drawings”
Barbara Burgess Maier
”if…. then”
Cynthia Roberts
”Suffusion: New Paintings and Drawings”
Suffusion:
when something slowly spreads throughout something else, like a feeling or a color
the gradual saturating of some substance or shade
the spreading of a fluid of the body into the surrounding tissues
The face of the earth is changing. Where there was dark forest, there are sparkling lights. Where there were green tracts of a thousand shades, there are stripped sand-colored stretches, mines, roads, and seas of buildings. What happens when we humans are able to return to a place where the birds drop location pins through their evening song, constructing a sound map that is also a time map citing the end of a day? Can we reconnect to a deep, internal circadian network, evidenced by the external world?
Suffusion is a body of work created in part in Costa Rica, at the Mauser Foundation international artist residency, located in the hills outside of Parrita, about an hour inland from Jaco. The roads into the hills are dusty, but the landscape reflects remnant lushness from unexpected rains. The view might be similar to a view generations have seen or Alexander von Humboldt would have celebrated, green swells dotted with palm trees and a robin’s egg blue sky dusky with humidity from a glimmering sea in the distance. Close up however, the network of life is detailed, continuous, and interconnected at a scale far more minute than the human eye can perceive.
Some versions of painting are about approximation, some about representation. The works in Suffusion could be understood as extraction—extracting visible data and pairing it with sensory, spiritual experience. Unlocking ecosystematic integration one leaf or vine at a time, recombining elemental qualities with an immersive, fluid space. I think of these paintings and drawings as holding up a sample for your consideration: what is the new world order of life? Are these forms the same as cloned plants in rows? Are we still interdependent with a particular intuitive world? Is there time to stitch these states back together? Or is a new recombinant future easing into the present, sealing pores and articulating new antennae?
Please enjoy these works as a celebration of place, gorging on natural beauty, reflecting on our moment in time.
Barbara Burgess Maier
”if…. then”
There is a particular energy that lives in the state of anticipation. I want my work to be filled with the charge of that kind of energy. The ellipsis, … between the if and the then, is the pause. That ultimate variable of time that provokes our wonderings about next. Whether happy expectation or foreboding dread, a willingness to engage fully is required.
My work allows me to process my responses to living with my antennae unfurled. The shifting pace of my mark-making and the layers of hide and seek between line and shape, all play with time and offer space for reflection… a place where experiences reemerge and memory intertwines with the present moment.
On a canvas one controls space and time… in the doing and viewing of the work time expands or collapses depending upon the context of personal connection with offerings of color, value, line, shape, texture, and composition.
As in music… the silence between two notes creates tension. That tension allows the traction that propels my work and working process. It is a call and response process.
The blank canvas calls, the mark is made. That mark then calls for its own response until the painting is finished. Long pondered and split second visual decisions demand to be made. A visual language of many voices, dialects, and rhythms sing stories from the heart.
I invite you to explore the dynamics my work offers… how marks meander or rush, how edges are confronted or avoided, how shapes pull apart or collide. Follow a line that slides or darts, a shape that crowds or cowers, a color that agitates or calms. Wander in, around, and through the marks. Pause or jump from one bit of color to another or across to the edge of another shape, slide down a line into complexity, or float up and away into a memory or the excitement of new and the beckoning of the yet unknown.
It is my hope that this work will provide a vehicle for your own personal journey across time and space at your own pace and will offer a transcendence past the constraints of visual specifics and into a personal world of the intimate associations of emotion and intellect.