Landscape Paintings and an Evaporation Pool By Danae Mattes
August 9 to December 6, 2015
These beautiful landscapes are the artist’s personal “maps” of time spent within nature, formal equivalents to the experience of moving through the landscape. She combines “materials and methods that are, in themselves, directly extracted from the earth and which interact in ways that are inherent to their physical properties.” That is, the paintings are created from natural materials (clay, fiber, and pigments), where shapes, patterns, and forms are revealed through natural processes––such as evaporation causing clay to dry and crack, and gravity moving water-based pigments across sloped canvases.
Mattes will also install an evaporation pool within the gallery. Liquid clay will be poured into a clay basin on the gallery floor. As the water evaporates from the clay over days and weeks, the various clays used will create distinct cracking and tonal patterns.