Randi-Reiss Mccormack “A Visceral Pursuit”

The Painting Center

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The Painting Center presents Randi Reiss-McCormack’s exhibition of A Visceral Pursuit in the Main Gallery and Project Room. This exhibition resists the containment of a singular category.

Excerpt from catalogue essay by Amy Eva Raehse:

“Randi Reiss-McCormack’s work develops in this way. It is imbued with a startling complexity and humanity that is about seeing because it reinforces a basic tenant: The more one looks, the more one sees. Similar to the implication of Tjukurpa, McCormack’s paintings and textile works resist the containment of a singular category. The effect of looking is instant, but the works reveal themselves slowly—bringing along a plasticity of natural forms, meandering line, shape, pigments, texture, and volume; combining to create multidimensional abstract, gestural compositions. No matter the origins of her forms or her points of departure, Randi Reiss McCormack’s practice is the pretext for seeing as an active, rather than a passive, act. This is why she has remained open to experimentation in both subject and material, making her work an affecting reminder of our own ephemeral reflections and emotions, bounded to our own materiality- our own flesh— as much as our cultural foundations. And so, the deep but elusive nature of her work, the “push and pull” of space, and her metamorphosed forms that appear as quickly as they dissolve back into their luscious surfaces cause ruminations on Tjukurpa.”

Amy Eva Raehse is Executive Director and Partner at Goya Contemporary Gallery in Baltimore. Curating over 100 exhibitions, Raehse has also been a juror for numerous competitions, and has placed art works in public and private collections worldwide. With over 20 years in the field, Ms. Raehse has taught at various Colleges and Universities, and lectures regularly about professional practices. She sits is on the Board of Directors at The Creative Alliance of Baltimore, University of Maryland Global Campus Art Advisory, and the Programming Advisory at Maryland Art Place. Raehse has worked in the museum, not-for-profit, commercial, and academic sectors of the arts, and is a founding member of the activist group Artists For Truth in Baltimore.

Originally from Boston Massachusetts, Randi Reiss-McCormack is an artist working between various processes, namely mixed-media painting, printmaking and textile. After earning an undergraduate degree in Painting and Printmaking at Cornell University, she spent a year working in various Printmaking and Painting Studios in Paris, France until relocating to Baltimore, Maryland to earn a graduate degree at The Maryland Institute, College of Art. Currently, she lives and works as an artist in Maryland, teaching, working in print studios, and as an Artist-in-Residence at the St. Francis Neighborhood Center. She has won a Maryland State Arts Council Award multiple times in different categories, a Trawick Prize, and is published in various publications including twice in New American Paintings. Reiss-McCormack has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions across the country and internationally. She works with wide ranging images from an array of sources, led by an intuition that emerges from the subconscious. The world between the conscious and subconscious is where most of her work resides. Working in a collage sensibility, no matter the media, images coalesce and collapse almost simultaneously, sometimes veering into a narrative then fleetingly moving on. This system of working deeply in different media is fed by an interest in the transformative effect of the different processes. Each process brings in an elaborate system that intervenes with the images and ideas, leading to a new work. Always led by a strong intuitive pull for things just outside of understanding, Reiss-McCormack finds a type of alchemy as new rules and games are set up between various disciplines and tactile qualities of each material reveal a new solution.