NYAB Event - Magnolia Laurie “Landmark”

Magnolia Laurie “Landmark”

frosch & portmann

This event has ended.

Laurie started this new body of work during her residency at the Jentel Foundation in Banner, WY. Driving form Baltimore to Wyoming last summer, the artist was thinking about the landscape’s history and transformation in the time that people have claimed ownership of it. The sense of increased scale while heading west evokes somewhat romantic and nostalgic feelings about it – even if it is marked by billboards, signs, old oil drilling rigs, scorched hillsides, and miles of fences taking possession of it all.

As a body, the new paintings have a sense of conflated meaning. They imply the sublime to subtly evoke the traditions and association of landscape painting, to acknowledge the melancholic cycles of infrastructure and decay, while also admitting to the somewhat consuming act of travel photography and tourism. In these conditions, what would be considered a landmark? The exhibition title plays with the duality of the term’s meaning as both a marker as well as a destination or place – it can indicate both where we are or where we want to go. It can be a point of reference in space but also an event or point in time, such as a turning point or a moment of discovery. In this context we could draw connections between the personal and the societal, the past and the present, the functional and the futile. With current political issues over water and energy resources, as well as what has felt like increasing severe weather, and steadily rising environmental concerns, Laurie wanted to incorporate the conflicting visual vocabulary that marks the land we live on and utilize. These are also our landmarks, they mark our occupation and use of the land, they mark a location, they will a moment in time - perhaps a turning point.

Magnolia Laurie has been thinking about parallax views or multiple vantage points and how that could be incorporated into a painting, but also how it could suggest the complexity of our relationship to land. This initiated ideas of multi-panel paintings that potentially shifted planes or perspectives. We relate to information presented in a two-dimensional space differently than we do to that in three-dimensional space; things that occupy our space command our attention.

Some paintings are shown on the walls while others occupy custom-made wooden structures. They bring the paintings off the wall and into an awkwardly active and insistent space that wanders in a non-committal manner between sculpture, picket-sign, billboard, and furniture.