Structure/Nature : Paintings by Claire Lambe, Laura Hexner and Mary Anne Erickson
The ever-growing need for mankind to manage resources for living leads to the building of heroic structures. Human survival demands water, food and housing, and scaffolding, highways and dams are constructions that enable large populations to flourish. At odds with these systems are the destruction of rivers, vistas and natural habitats by concrete pillars, asphalt highways and ill-conceived housing projects. These structures are physically built to dominate and harness nature as well as facilitate the transit of natural resources. However, it is nature’s relentless superpower, entropy, that will ultimately dismantle and destroy all massive efforts to control and re-contour the environment. Dams will run dry, deserts will overtake farmlands and jungles will devour the metal I-beams of empty condominiums.
Artists Claire Lambe, Laura Hexner and Mary Anne Erickson each consider the Pyrrhic victory of human constructions within the backdrop of an immense, relentlessly eroding and infinitely patient natural landscape.
Structure/Nature: Claire LAMB, Laura HEXNER and Mary Anne ERICKSON is on view through April 24, 2016
About the Artists:
Claire Lambe: Born in Ireland, Claire Lambe has a peripatetic artistic focus that reflects her extensive travels and intellectual obsessions. Lately Lambe’s work is concerned with the battle for resources and the lottery that decides who wins a game where one side increasingly holds the majority of tickets.
Laura Hexner: Laura Hexner has been meticulously painting and drawing the often overlooked subjects of everyday life: bridges, dams, telephone poles and highways. Her technical elegance with seemingly mundane subjects creates an abstract drama characteristic of her work.
Mary Anne Erickson: Mary Anne Erickson has long been fascinated by the deterioration and decay of vintage roadside American culture. Her color saturated photo-realist paintings capture the faded bucolic optimism of the Post-War years against the backdrop of a vast and empty western landscape
