Michelle Marchesseault & Julia Shirar Exhibition

La MaMa La Galleria

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La MaMa Galleria present, for its final exhibition of 2018, the paintings of Michelle Marchesseault and Julia Shirar, curated by Elise Gardella. Experiencing their paintings together generates an energetic dialogue of composition, surface, and content. The artists rebelliously represent real time with keen affinities for the materials and the processes of painting. Believing in the value of the moment, they preserve it by committing it to paint and surface. Shirar chronicles a life lived and Marchesseault records the frequency of a sudden thought or sensation.

Julia Shirar paints from life and memory. She works closely with her subjects, often in their own domestic spaces, or engaging with them in a library or schoolyard. There is an intensity that builds between painter and sitter. Shirar sometimes describes this shared experience as form of communion: they are joined in real time by the singular exercise of making a painting. Women dominate her current portraits of family members, friends, neighbors, and passer-bys. Rather than being erased or disappeared by a culture that would forget them, they remain in rich detail, intensified by Shirar’s range of painting surfaces: birch, canvas, found linen and gathered materials, including found paper and cloth.

Marks repeat across and within Michelle Marchesseault’s paintings. They strike out over canvas or board, beating with a raw extemporaneous rhythm. Color drives the compositions, allowing harmonies to emerge without restraining discord. She pushes her paintings toward decomposition, frequently working with specific actions of subtraction and accumulation, scratching away and then restoring the surface. Through variations of harmonic colors and utilizing ingenious mediums and specific combinations of paint, her paintings express links between body and mind, breath and impulse. Through this expression, she explores the significance and meanings of life’s improvisational experiences and the sensations those experiences evoke.

Michelle Marchesseault (b. 1974) is originally from Indianapolis, Indiana. She attended the Herron School of Art for painting before moving to Chicago to focus on music, both touring and performing. In Austin, Texas, she continued to perform music and develop an art practice. Often commissioned for projects, she has made pieces for site-specific installations, public spaces, interiors, performances, and theater. Michelle has had solo shows in Austin at Domy and Northern-Southern Gallery and group exhibitions both in Texas and New York. She lives and works in Brooklyn and Callicoon, NY.

Julia Shirar (b. 1970) was born in Philadelphia and raised in Texas and Delaware, she has a BFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art, PA and an MFA from California College of Arts and Crafts. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at: The Tate Modern, London; Gallery II, the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; The National Veteran’s Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Gray Area Foundation for Art, San Francisco, CA; Rowan Morrison Gallery, Oakland, CA; and Songs for Presidents, Ridgewood, NY. Julia currently lives and works in Queens, NY and is an Adjunct Professor of sound at the Feirstein School of Graduate Studies, Brooklyn College.