3 minute read
Mary Ann Strandell: The Conversation
MARY ANN STRANDELL: The Conversation
June 4 - August 22, 2020
SHERRY LEEDY CONTEMPORARY ART | 2004 Baltimore Ave. Kansas City, MO 64108 | 816.221.2626 | www.sherryleedy.com
Mary Ann Strandell Artist Statement
The Conversation explores Mary Ann Strandell’s evolving relationship between architecture, nature, and chinoiserie, expressed via ink drawings within lenticular prints and oil paintings. She uses these subjects, along with diverse artistic production, to examine a sense of time and place through location and history. Singular themed oil paintings of nature and architecture are presented along with the layered narratives of lenticular media. The Conversation demonstrates a prismatic relationship between these different subjects and medias.
The variety of Strandell’s work is captivating, woven through her polyglot style. While she continues the paintings of songbirds that many will find familiar, she adds magnolia blossom and tulip paintings that are framed very tightly as an exuberant expression of spring. These paintings are nature asserting itself in the city. Also included is an architectural structure rising up in the city as an expression of human nature, or the extension of humans in nature. It is in this painting that Strandell grapples with the boundaries of nature and culture. These architecture related works, in both paintings and lenticular prints, play off each other. Both media are pictorial and algorithmic: the paintings are often disassembled and recapitulated into the lenticular media. This is part of The Conversation.
For example, two of the architectural lenticular works are of historic Kansas City buildings: Western Auto and Power and Light. Both of these works began as oil on canvas paintings. From these oils, Strandell interweaves the initial drawing of the subject, along with ink studies of the structure of the building when it was under construction. It’s as if the buildings are dreaming their original skeleton, or that the skeleton is imagining its finished state. Each work contains an 18th century porcelain object that acts as a postscript for the markings of trade and commerce.
The title of the show comes from Strandell’s works that portray the 1970’s sunken couch called a conversation pit. This starts the collection of objects that make appearances throughout the works. The layered floating references include icons from other eras: a sputnik lamp, 15th century vase, cocktails, kitsch porcelain and modernist light fixtures. Often the lenticulars begin as singular painting, a stylized couch here, a conversation pit there that recede into the backdrop while other collaged images float above.
The Conversation Pit I, 2019, 3-D Lenticular media, 21” x 32”, Ed 1/20
West O (Quarantine), 2020, Oil on canvas, 48” x 36”
Loose Park (Quarantine), 2020, Oil on canvas, 12” x 16”
Bridge/Canada, 2019, oil on canvas, 60” x 48”
Power and Light/Prophet (Quarantine), 2020, 3-D Lenticular media, 28” x 22”, Ed 1/20
West O, 2020, 3-D Lenticular media, 28” x 22”, Ed 1/20
Magnolia/Central Park, 2019, Oil on canvas, 60” x 48”
The Conversation Pit II, 2019, 3-D Lenticular media, 21” x 32”, Ed 1/20
Heavy Lifting (Quarantine), 2020, 3-D Lenticular Media, 18” x 14”, Ed 1/20
Eastern Bluebird/Mountain Bluebird (Quarantine), 2020, Oil on canvas, 40”x 30”
Map/Avenue 9th and 10th, 2016, 3-D Lenticular media, 42” x 64”
Tulip/Eight, 2019, Oil on canvas, 40” x 30”
Tulip/Nine, 2019, Oil on canvas, 40” x 30”
Birds with Small Lantern, 2020, Oil on canvas, 48” x 36”
