Exhibitions

MARY K VANGIESON: CHASING THE EPHEMERAL

Dixon Gallery and Gardens / 4339 Park Ave. September 28, 2025 - January 4, 2026

Mary K VanGieson

Self-described “artist, educator, storyteller, collector, and sometime writer” Mary K VanGieson creates prints, sculptures, and installations using alternative materials such as coffee filters and foraged plants as ways to investigate themes including loss, erosion, and the transitory. Chasing the Ephemeral features eco prints made by layering organic materials including leaves, plants, and onion skins between sheets of plain, unmarked Stonehenge paper. Bundled tightly around a rusty can or clamped between pieces of scrap wood, the paper and plants are boiled for hours in water and vinegar, resulting in the transfer of shapes and colors derived from the vegetation to the paper. Tannin-rich foliage works best, creating natural colors that bind with and dye fibers in the paper. For this exhibition, the artist sourced plants and leaves including avocado, eucalyptus, maple, oak, redbud, rose, sumac, and willow, from her own home and yard and from the Dixon’s gardens.

VanGieson manipulates the pristine eco prints by combining, tearing, curling, cutting, folding, collaging, and sewing them to create new sculptural artworks. Her works resonate with the influences of artists including the poet Mary Oliver (1935 – 2019) who declared “The leaf has a song in it” and the famous dictum written in 1964 by artist Jasper Johns (born 1930): “Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it. [Repeat.]” VanGieson’s art follows a similarly transformational path—from plant, to pot, to printed paper, to sculpture, to wall-hung installation—along the way preserving traces of the short-lived and fleeting nature of living things.