Blue on Blue on Blue
With Marguerite Bailey | Brit | Maggie Heath
Curated by: Luiza Lukova & Emma Christ
August 9, 2018, through August 28, 2018
Blue on Blue on Blue opens at Nationale as a month-long pop-up series curated by Luiza Lukova & Emma Christ. Divided into three parts, each week-long exhibition seeks to transform the gallery space with regards to materiality, presence, self-portraiture, and the color blue. The three artists featured present a variety of mediums and means of expression, while still succinctly embodying a unified theme that allows their shows to live sequentially in the gallery space.
Week One: Marguerite Bailey
On view August 9-14
Reception Sunday, August 12, 2018, from 5–7 PM
The sensation of weightlessness, of floating in a body of water while softly gazing at the sky, is at the forefront of the paper pulp works created by Marguerite Bailey. This liminal space is the essence Bailey captures in her paintings, along with the meditation that occurs when in between these two seemingly infinite and formless plains, both of them blue.
Marguerite Bailey is an interdisciplinary artist working and living in Portland, OR. Her work involves a deep connection to the material, most often the pulp of paper. The handmade papers are compilations of many objects into one -- an act similar to the compression of time into memory.
Week Two: Brit
On view August 16-21
Reception Saturday, August 18, 2018, from 5–7 PM
Evoking strong resonances of self-portraiture, Brit’s paintings are an amalgamation of collage and text-based art. Painting directly onto found materials, layering images atop one another and illustrating everyday recognizable objects, their canvases act like capsules or journals of a specific time and mindset. The pieces illustrate the internal processing of the world around them and their position within it. In offering a more raw and process-based approach to painting, these works serve as intricate depictions of the complex internal mechanism at play in daily life. Using this self-referential structure, the artist explores themes of identity, poverty, and the simple desire to understand the complications that abound among us all.
Brit is a painter and found artist based in Portland, OR. Their work focuses heavily on depicting shifting states of transition.
Week Three: Maggie Heath
On view August 23-28
Reception Sunday, August 26 2018, from 5–7 PM
Driven by a desire to make visible the structure that exists beneath the surface, Maggie Heath’s installation serves as an entry into the unseen skeletal system that supports and at times muddles our existence. Also working within the themes of layering and unveiling, Heath draws inspiration from ice formations, foggy Minnesota winters, and the physical reactions of the body to certain external pressures. By considering and manipulating light, stability, and perception in her installation she breaks past the visible surface of the gallery space to expose the most minute materials of our existence. Playing with textures, movement, and fog, she highlights the simultaneous ephemerality and vitality that can be imposed by boundaries, just as easily as it can be dismantled. She asks, how is weight bared? How does emotion linger? How can we experience both at once?
Maggie Heath is a sculptor, and an installation & multi-media artist working in Portland, OR.