“But in writing this book I found myself sadly hampered by the impossibility of drawing such diagrams as were necessary for my purpose; for of course, in our country of Flatland, there are no tablets but Lines, and no diagrams but Lines, all in one straight Line and only distinguishable by difference of size and brightness; so that, when I had finished my treatise… I could not feel certain that many would understand my meaning.” Flatland: a romance of many dimensions, Edwin Abbot Abbot
In a recent article for Bomb, Matthew J. Abrams highlights the innate qualities of Maggie Ogden’s raw canvases: “Most painters would desaturate a color through tinting or adding white, but Ogden’s monochromatic spectra are controlled through pure dilution, and in that way these painting are not just about lightness or dilution, but also erasure.” The roots of Ogden’s current approach to abstraction can be traced in Tarot (2014). This dichromatic, gestural painting is teeming with an accumulation of masked, cryptic notes. Like a page torn from a daily calendar, this earlier painting retains the minutia of her thought process. As Ogden’s work has shifted away from factual observation, these small memos have been replaced with motion, line and mark. Moving deeper into the fiction of the painting, Ogden’s work speaks to a mutable deletion through process.
This sensibility of transformative limitation is shared by Corydon Cowansage, Mary Laube, Amanda Martinez and Margaux Ogden, whose works comprise Portals. Operating within a spare vocabulary in which innately personal systems of logic displace empiricism and objectivity, these artists reference architectural spaces, personal artifacts and musical composition, both transcending and obfuscating their source material through pattern and repetition.
Corydon Cowansage’s Hole draws the viewer into the center of the painting through a series of concentric rectangles. One could be peering down a well or viewing a digitized, pixelated orifice. This observational relationship to the body is subverted through the lens of minimalism. Flattened perspective, optical radiance and anthropomorphized architecture animate her paintings, leaving the viewer floating over precarious walls and teetering stairs.
Mary Laube draws from such diverse sources as memorial artifacts and structures, traditional Korean adornment, dollhouses, and museum displays. Despite the flatness of parallel perspective, the layered surfaces of her paintings retain tactility. This interaction between likeness and object reflects a transference between corporeal and ethereal; analogous to the porosity between memory, imagination, and lived experience.
The sculptures of Amanda Martinez collapse the rigidity of archeological fragments with the softness of textile, while completely subverting and displacing one’s sense of scale. Mesmeric, monolithic forms are built from hand-carved, painted blocks of foam. Martinez’s early education in music plays a formative role in her artistic development; her work has been influenced by systems of musical composition and the visual translation of music in early music video technology. Testament from 2019 shows a latent relationship to music working within a more obscurely personal framework. In the absence of direct references, we are left with a purity of form in which the artist’s hand is subtly revealed.
In a recent article for Bomb, Matthew J. Abrams highlights the innate qualities of Maggie Ogden’s raw canvases: “Most painters would desaturate a color through tinting or adding white, but Ogden’s monochromatic spectra are controlled through pure dilution, and in that way these painting are not just about lightness or dilution, but also erasure.” The roots of Ogden’s current approach to abstraction can be traced in Tarot (2014). This dichromatic, gestural painting is teeming with an accumulation of masked, cryptic notes. Like a page torn from a daily calendar, this earlier painting retains the minutia of her thought process. As Ogden’s work has shifted away from factual observation, these small memos have been replaced with motion, line and mark. Moving deeper into the fiction of the painting, Ogden’s work speaks to a mutable deletion through process.
This sensibility of transformative limitation is shared by Corydon Cowansage, Mary Laube, Amanda Martinez and Margaux Ogden, whose works comprise Portals. Operating within a spare vocabulary in which innately personal systems of logic displace empiricism and objectivity, these artists reference architectural spaces, personal artifacts and musical composition, both transcending and obfuscating their source material through pattern and repetition.
Corydon Cowansage’s Hole draws the viewer into the center of the painting through a series of concentric rectangles. One could be peering down a well or viewing a digitized, pixelated orifice. This observational relationship to the body is subverted through the lens of minimalism. Flattened perspective, optical radiance and anthropomorphized architecture animate her paintings, leaving the viewer floating over precarious walls and teetering stairs.
Mary Laube draws from such diverse sources as memorial artifacts and structures, traditional Korean adornment, dollhouses, and museum displays. Despite the flatness of parallel perspective, the layered surfaces of her paintings retain tactility. This interaction between likeness and object reflects a transference between corporeal and ethereal; analogous to the porosity between memory, imagination, and lived experience.
The sculptures of Amanda Martinez collapse the rigidity of archeological fragments with the softness of textile, while completely subverting and displacing one’s sense of scale. Mesmeric, monolithic forms are built from hand-carved, painted blocks of foam. Martinez’s early education in music plays a formative role in her artistic development; her work has been influenced by systems of musical composition and the visual translation of music in early music video technology. Testament from 2019 shows a latent relationship to music working within a more obscurely personal framework. In the absence of direct references, we are left with a purity of form in which the artist’s hand is subtly revealed.
