mary rousseaux
Rousseaux is an artist fluent in different visual medias -- painting, sculpture, the artist book and photography, but remains primarily a painter. Her fluency and versatility has allowed her to expand the language of painting. She has been at the forefront of creating work that pushes the imagination and challenges the traditional definitions and formal concerns of contemporary painting. Working on or altering the two-dimensional surface, continuing to investigate how we see, her work conveys a layering and compression of time, space and place that is directly informed by the changing landscape of the city. Her work continues to explore the ideas of memory and how they weave together to create our reality.
STATEMENT
My current work is a direct reflection of the impact of an unstable political landscape married to the pandemic. The chaos that has ensued due to the shift in the moral perspective of our government that allowed the derogation of our freedom of speech, personal liberties and the rights of all people. We were forced into a hostile chaos that whipped people into a frenzy of hate and bigotry and told by the powers that be that it was OK to hate. Hate those who were different, those who made you uncomfortable or simply did not fit your ideal. Daily news reenforced these ideas. Violence erupted in all arenas from the highest courts to the nation’s capital. We walked the landscape in fear. Fear from death, covid, and fear of each other. We were tied in knots, locked in and locked out of our communities. Our support systems vanished. I would walk my neighborhood and collect the trash that had been tossed out of cars, left in vacant lots and dumped randomly in front of my home.
I worked to make some sense of this. The materials collected in my studio, and I started to piece them together. Using the cast-off paints I found, I began to just paint and move and make marks freeing my sadness and anger. The resulting works evoke that process, trying to find a beauty in the release. Bridging the ugly with healing. Scrapping and building layers. Tearing and digging at the surface. Finding a calm, and maybe beauty, mostly a freedom that had been robbed by hate. The work was healing. The results are there for the viewer to experience and feel the tensions but also search for the quiet moments of reflection, rest and peace.