THE FOCUS View all posts from The Focus

Curatorial Statement:

"Each of these artists finds their way of highlighting the relationship between the material and pictorial qualities of their work. Pattern and image work in conjunction with material, be it paint, caulk, woven fabric, or found plastics. These are selections where I see both as equal players, where one makes the other. It is this combination, this quality in an artwork, that makes me linger, digest, and return – an unfolding experience that rewards close looking."

Featuring Eleanor Aldrich, Brianna Bass, Mary Laube, Corkey Sinks, and Katherine Wagner

“Mary Laube's images flatten the pictorial space while emphasizing shadows that suggest dimensionality. They take on the best of the illusionistic potential of paint to render patterns and textures – the iridescence of mother of pearl, crisp edges of solid structures – while offering only fragments: truncated block text, furniture forms ambiguously removed from context. There's something compelling about this fragmentation, where the image hovers between something recognizable and just out of reach, within the spectrum of figuration and abstraction.”

“Brianna Bass makes spectral paintings that organize themselves around the logic of painted bands or grids. This self-imposed systematic limitation suggests an apparent pseudoscientific methodology, a study of color relationships. Her rhythmic abstractions call to mind sound waves, as in “Double Interference Ripple”. Each band or block of color is thickly applied so that the surface variation of raised edges becomes a secondary, topographical pattern through which we see the first, complicating the otherwise straightforward image.”

“Grid structures also appear in a variety of materials in Corkey Sinks's work, including Jacquard weavings, drawings, and hand-cut, heat-fused plastic. Found HDPE plastics including shopping bags and plastic tarps are crafted into skewed grids with the handmade charm of quilts, while the plastic surface presents these familiar geometries anew.”

“Eleanor Aldrich creates a stronger connection between the tactile qualities her materials and subject matter than rendering alone. She marries the textural qualities of her experimental materials to images that are at once mundane and linked to art history. A figure in a lawn chair is both an everyday scene and her own take on the grid as an emblematic structure of modernist painting. Through a painterly alchemy, material transforms into image based on the relationship between the two, privileging their physical and tactile connection over realistic rendering.”

“Katherine Wagner paints flattened images that suggest crumpled or draped textiles onto a support of stretched patterned fabric. The image fills the picture plane, leaving no negative space or tonal modeling to expand the pictorial depth. The patterned fabrics she paints on emphasize the underlying surface variation of the weave structure in contrast to the flatness of the painted image. While the titles suggest the imagery emerges from specific personal memories and associations, the work leaves enough space for the viewer to consider their own relationship to the textiles in their own lives.”

— Astri Snodgrass, December 2019

Curator Bio:

Astri Snodgrass in an artist and educator based in Boise, Idaho. Her work has been exhibited nationally in solo and group shows, including COOP Gallery, mild climate, and Channel to Channel (Nashville, TN), the Fuel and Lumber Co. (Birmingham, AL), Harper College (Palatine, IL), the University of West Georgia (Carrollton, GA), The Fuller Projects at Indiana University (Bloomington, IN), the Boise Art Museum, and Ming Studios (Boise, ID). She is a Hambidge Fellow and a VCCA Fellow, and has been an Artist-in-Residence at Vermont Studio Center and Studios Midwest. Astri is an Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting at Boise State University.