In this virtual curation, Laura Crehuet Berman, Kit Porter, Cat Rigdon each explore abstraction in unique and powerful ways. Careful consideration of form, colour and media allow each artist to beautifully convey their thoughtful ideas.
American artist Laura Crehuet Berman creates enchantingly colourful prints full of imagination and light.
Bold layers of perfectly mixed ink is pressed in soft oval shapes to create complex colour gradients that pull the viewer in. The mix of blended and hard edges builds a glow emanating from the work. Berman's monoprints allow each pigment to have the freedom of movement and surprise while she masterfully manipulates the media to create controlled, precise and yet unpredictably beautiful imagery. We are reminded of brilliant, sparkling gems or the smooth stones of children's costume jewelry. Both have a preciousness to their beholder, embodying the beauty of nature and the weight of love or play. Each form also has a gravity, each layer being compressed as if layers of the earth. While most prints are small to medium in scale, we can't help imagining them double the size and able to capture the magnitude of this pressure.
In essence, Laura Cruhuet Berman's monoprints are a wonderful example of control and chance working together to create truly stunning images. She has an incredible eye for captivating colour palettes and each work shines with her bright and cheerful energy.
South Carolina based artist Kit Porter creates paintings inspired by the way marine debris is transformed into beautiful objects by the powerful force of environmental erosion.
Using washes of acrylic paint in cool tones of blue, green and grey, Porter captures fragments of debris as a carefully abstracted portrait of each object, elevating the unique shapes that have been shaped by the sea. The careful abstraction leaves us just enough to imagine the life of her fragments before being disposed of and began broken down both as glass on a beach and as a compositional element. Positive and negative space play together to build rhythm from hard edges and silhouettes, highlighted by flat colour fields and pops of complementaries. Their wash-like colours are reminiscent of sea glass or leaves floating in sunlit water. Her body of work cumulates to create an impactful illustration of waste and environmental damage created by our interaction with the natural world.
Kit Porter's paintings repurpose the disposed of and forgotten to create something beautiful out of decay. Her practice acts as a crucial reminder of the permanence of objects such as plastic bottles how their fragments are timeless.
Cat Rigdon creates images based on her tumultuous experience with living in Dallas Texas and desire to be surrounded by beauty.
Rigdon's drawings piece together repetitive and canonized architectural motifs, including vaulted ceilings and stone pattern work. These elements are depicted using greys, blues and electric teals that emote bitterness and distressed emotional energy, and when paired with titles such as "Quarantine Walkies" and "Post Summer Depression" create a clear narrative of discontentment or unrest within Cat's work. Rigdon's use of Dura-Lar as the surface on which she draws on provides a glow and soft blurred edge to linework, offering an unreal or dreamscape quality to the structures she builds.
Cat Rigdon's work acts as a meditation on place and her experience within it, and effectively constructs a distraction from the city that surrounds her while exploring pattern, colour, and composition.
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