MARCY ROSENBLAT: SHADOW LINERS
September 18th - October 30th, 2020
Blue Grey Veil, 2020, pigment and silica medium on canvas, 48 x 52 inches
Jason McCoy Gallery is pleased to present SHADOW LINERS, an exclusive online exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by Marcy Rosenblat.
While Rosenblat has worked with figurative narratives in the past, her relationship with abstraction has spanned over 25 years. Even so, her new body of work has employed something quite different. Onto compositions of luminous abstract shapes, she sprays paint through pieces of lace. This creates the illusion of a mysterious fabric veiling parts of the canvas, generating a vivid interplay between background and surface pattern.
Rosenblat notes: "Focusing on something behind a drape engages a specific thought process. The act of bringing something into view agitates the mind as it tries to grasp the content of what is being revealed. I'm interested in making paintings that agitate the viewing mind in the same way, where in addition to being looked at the paint becomes something the viewer tries to look through."
Cinch, 2020, Pigment and silica medium on canvas, 48 x 48 inches
Despite Rosenblat’s formal concerns, the patterns she introduces bring about an array of allusions, ranging from curtains, pixels, and tattoos. This provides her work with a perhaps originally unintentional but welcomed subtext. Although historically, the making of lace (unlike embroidery for example) was not considered a gender specific practice, the association of the material with homemaking or with the adornment of fanciful female gowns, certainly was. By liberating lace from any traditional and cultural context and only using small sections of larger fabrics, Rosenblat guides our focus straight to its intricate, web-like details.
Born in 1952 in Chicago, Marcy Rosenblat currently lives and works in Brooklyn. She received her B.F.A. from Kansas City Art Institute and her M.F.A. from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Rawls Museum Arts, Virginia; Fordham University, New York; Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts; The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; and Salisbury University, Maryland. Rosenblat received an artist’s grant from the Women’s Art Development Committee in 1998. She is currently an Adjunct Professor of Fine Arts at The Fashion Institute of Technology.
