06/02/2020 - 08/02/2020

Upper Gallery

Industrial Strength presents works from the Permanent Collection, inspired by the artist’s direct experience of visiting industrial steel blast furnaces while living in France. She continued her research by examining industrial photographs for added reference and has been making art around this subject matter for over 30 years.

The hard-edged machinery, bursts with color depicting in her large-scale works on paper the force of heat and energy produced by such an industry.  Arresting in color and value shifts, the composition’s scale and painterly qualities draw us in, transforming industrial subjects into wholly different relationships of color, tone, and form.

The gallery space itself becomes a part of the experience with the artist’s end near to-scale massive subjects engaging our perception.  As her work lies directly against the gallery walls, unframed and brilliant in hue and value. The wall heights and widths serve as structural backdrop around her massive works. This physical relationship between viewer, gallery, and art supports the awestruck presence of her formidable pictures.

In Ice Cream, 1999/2000, we are enveloped in clouds of green and white squiggles of gouache creating smoldering marks building up from the central area of color to a gray colorless edge. The experience is reminiscent of smoke and yet evokes qualities of a romanticizing of such a subject, presenting a sensual and seductive encounter brought into being by the artist’s own hand.

The qualities of her application of writhing both opaque and decisive, keep the eye moving throughout the immense picture plane. The subject is named but also abstracted and becomes a means for the lush qualities of her application of paint. By way of her art melding subject within its form, texture, and color or tone, the artist creates an experience for the viewer that is nothing less than momentous.

-D. Fullerton, Curator of Exhibitions, 2020