Laura Stack | Designer Organisms and Mary Gibney | Pile Up, An Exhibition of Exuberant Paintings

 Both artists have vivid imaginations and share a love for exuberant color. Stack shows abstract paintings of otherworldly biological specimens that gradate in color across the gallery wall. Mary Gibney exhibits figurative acrylic portraits that range from characters in the local bar to an eccentric one might meet in a dream.  

About the Artists

Laura Stack's art practice is motivated by reverence for life and the natural world. Her Designer Organism painting series illustrates her fascination with biology and the dichotomy that living things can now comprise synthetic elements. Stack explores this paradigm shift by creating paintings that are an imagined view of artificial life in what she calls the "new natural." Laura imagines otherworldly life forms existing in an environment with its own physical laws. Beautiful freaks of the natural world, such as fungi, microfauna, agates, and marine invertebrates, inspire her work's abstract imagery and color. Science fiction literature activates her imagination from writers such as Jeff VanderMeer, Margaret Atwood, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Sue Burke. In her painting installation, Stack aims to create a sense of growth, organisms evolving towards an amalgam of the natural and the artificial. This dynamic exhibit will show the developing growth patterns of the Designer Organisms throughout the month of the exhibition.

Mary Gibney's art builds on itself, creating a dense environment of objects, paintings, drawings, small head sculptures, and other shaped items, sometimes combined with found props to accompany and expand the art. Each piece is part of the whole experience in a more-is-better kind of way. She continues to experiment with shaped and cut-out paintings and other methods of hanging and displaying her art. Her ongoing obsession is with body parts, particularly heads, and eyes (also mouths and breasts), as well as portraits of unknown and imaginary people and the porous boundaries between male and femaleness. The handmade-ness and its imperfection convey feeling and invite the viewer to make their own connections of meaning. She is fascinated by how significance can be attached to a religious or fetishistic object, allowing it to become a portal to another level of emotion.

The artists will be at Rosalux during gallery hours on these days.

Laura Stack on Feb. 13th, 19th, 26th  / Mary Gibney on Feb. 6th, 20th, 26th, 27th.

Gallery Hours

Saturday and Sunday: 12:00 PM - 4:00 PM