Magnolia Laurie “feeling our way forward”

FROSCH&CO

This event has ended.

FROSCH&CO presents feeling our way forward, Magnolia Laurie’s sixth solo show with the gallery. The exhibition features recent paintings by the Baltimore based artist.

Magnolia Laurie’s new works started with an interest in the duality of the horizon line as both a means of orientation and a dividing point. The horizon line reveals a viewer’s vantage point and implies a position and connection to the landscape. It also carves through space, delineating between land and sky, here and there, now and then, us and them.

Compositionally, the horizon lines in many of the paintings are roughly aligned, although the climate and quality of the landscape change from one to the next. An intersection is accentuated by the wide horizontal format of the large scale paintings, while the visual vocabulary of the smaller square or narrow vertical panels offers less orientation and guidance.
Like so much in the last few years, this body of work has paused, pivoted, adapted, and then continued along an altered course. Some horizon lines were repositioned, and some slipped out of sight entirely, and an exploration of orientation and vantage point gradually evolved to reflect a condition of disorientation. These works are about the landscape, the environment, and our disorienting distance and proximity to a quickly changing horizon line. Thrown off course, these paintings are about searching and feeling our way forward.

Born in Hyannis, MA and raised in Puerto Rico, Magnolia Laurie lives and works in Baltimore, MD. She received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, her P.B.A. from San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA and her M.F.A. from Mount Royal School of Art, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD. Laurie is an associate professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA.

Among many other venues, her work has been exhibited at the The Phillips Museum of Art, PA, the Hamiltonian Gallery, Washington, DC, the Kemper Art Museum, MO, MONO Practice, MD, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD. Laurie’s work has been supported with grants from the Creative Baltimore Fund, the Maryland State Arts Council Grants, the Belle Foundation, and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. The artist has been awarded residencies across the United States including at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, VA, the Vermont Studio Center, VT, and the Jentel Foundation, WY.