Opening Reception: Saturday, February 5th, 7:00-10:00 pm
Art Talk and Open House: Saturday, February 26th, 1:00-4:00 pm. Art Talk at 2:00 pm.
Exhibition Dates: February 5th-27th, 2022. (Mask Required)
Gallery Hours: Sat & Sun 12-4 pm and by appt.
The artists will be at Rosalux during gallery hours on these days.
Laura Stack on Feb. 13th, 19th, 26th. Mary Gibney on Feb. 6th, 20th, 26th, 27th.
Rosalux Gallery presents an exhibition featuring Laura Stack's Designer Organisms and Mary Gibney's Pile Up. Both artists have vivid imaginations and share a love for exuberant color. Stack shows abstract paintings of otherworldly biological specimens that gradate in color across the gallery wall. Mary Gibney exhibits figurative acrylic portraits that range from characters in the local bar to an eccentric one might meet in a dream.
Laura Stack's Designer Organism painting series illustrates her fascination with biology and the dichotomy that living things can now comprise synthetic elements. What constitutes "life" is elusive due to synthetic biology, where organisms are engineered. Stack explores this paradigm shift by creating paintings that are an imagined view of artificial life in what she calls the "new natural."
When Stack is engaged in the painting process, she imagines otherworldly life forms existing in an environment with its own physical laws. Beautiful freaks of the natural world, such as fungi, microfauna, agates, and marine invertebrates, inspire her work's abstract imagery and color. Science fiction literature activates her imagination from writers such as; Jeff VanderMeer, Margaret Atwood, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Sue Burke.
Laura uses controlled and improvisational approaches with gouache and ink, rendering tubular, striped forms that jet out from a fluid, primordial landscape. Her goal is to create a sense of growth, organisms evolving towards an amalgam of the natural and the artificial. The Designer Organisms in this exhibition will transform throughout the month of the show.
Mary Gibney's art builds on itself, creating a dense environment of objects - paintings, drawings, small head sculptures, and other shaped items, sometimes combined with found props to accompany and expand the art. Each piece is part of the whole experience in a more-is-better kind of way. She continues to experiment with shaped and cut-out paintings and other methods of hanging and displaying her art. Her ongoing obsession is with body parts, particularly heads, and eyes (also mouths and breasts), as well as portraits of unknown and imaginary people and the porous boundaries between male and femaleness. The handmade and its imperfection convey feeling and invite the viewer to make their own connections of meaning. She is fascinated by how significance can be attached to a religious or fetishistic object, allowing it to become a portal to another level of emotion.
Contact: laurastackart@gmail.com and mary@marygibney.com