MARY ANN STRANDELL

The Floating Bridge Exhibition

September 3 - October 2, 2008

String Gallery Wells College
170 Main Street
Aurora, NY 13026
stringroomgallery@wells.edu

The Floating Bridge exhibition showcases Mary Ann Strandell’s 3d lenticular print media, large scale print on paper, and with a new site-specific ink drawing in-situ with four lenticular works. The active layered imagery is an Op Art sensation of orbs, ink drawings of European palatial vignettes, California modern architecture, and readapted imagery from Hokasii woodcuts, and porcelain tea-cups. These configured scenes present a world in motion. The line drawing, on both the wall, and within the print media is a static hand-made presence in a tsunami of patterning. Strandell considers the collision of historic space between eastern and western sensibilities; a parallax time alluding to present day shifts of power, and changing economic values. Strandell writes, “There is a range of pieces- in the earlier works I am layering my sumi brush drawings of 18th century Japanese  woodcuts with those of European royal bedrooms. In other works, my ink renditions of California architecture are overlaid with silhouettes of chandelier forms, aspects from my oil paintings, and other chinoserie vignettes found in museum collections”. Her later works involve images of social and sexual folly, interwoven with conduits of the landscape such as hydroelectric dams, weirs, and emergency sirens.

The 3d lenticular prints reveal layered information through a lens using digital technology and fabrication. These layers are activated by the viewer. The scale and repetition of placement with the String Gallery coincides with the different spatial and light shifts of the gallery. Thus, an active dialectic evolves these renderings of spacious curiosity in a hypnotic  floating world.