Mary Weatherford creates large paintings comprising motifs of spontaneous sponge painting on heavy linen canvases surmounted by one or more carefully shaped and arranged colored neon tubes. The canvas, prepared with white chalk mixed with marble dust, and worked with Flashe varnish, a highly pigmented but readily diluted emulsion, amazingly supports different applications of color. The surface of the paint varies from opaque and velvety to transparent and translucent. The canvas is densely filled at times, reading as a pictorial continuum; at others, it shifts in color from one edge of the painting to the other; and to others still it contains clusters of brands set in relatively stark surroundings. And the color itself varies significantly: dull blues, muted yellows, and carnival reds; mineral shades, evoking slate or steel; pinks suggesting fruits or meat; and many different blacks, resembling shiny feathers.
The neon tubes connected to these fields of color advance a unique practice Weatherford began in 2012, inspired by illuminated street signs in old Bakersfield, California. In his use of neon, he transformed what had previously been used for advertising – and had been appropriated as such by previous artists – into a radically new form of pictorial design. Casting an industrial light on the fields of colour, the neon tubes read hand-drawn lines across the surface, even if they are sometimes so bright they are blinding to look at, creating afterimages. Weatherford used one or five individual tubes, often bent away from the surface, and sometimes extending beyond the edges of the canvas. The strings for the neon fixtures create their layer of design over the painting and lead to large magnetic transformers placed like anchors on the floor.
While Weatherford's previous paintings have primarily referenced the experience of places or climates, his new ones find their inspiration in situations and events. Drawing on his reactions to current events and his experience of pre-modern narrative pictorial compositions, he thinks of these new canvases as aspiring to the function of earlier history paintings that tell of current or mythological facts to address fundamental and current concerns.
Mary Weatherford was born in 1963 in Ojai, California and lives and works in Los Angeles. Her collections include the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, MA; and National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. Weatherford's work has been featured in major solo and group exhibitions internationally, including The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in a Timeless World, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014-15); Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Painting, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014-15); and Between Two Worlds: Art of California, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017-18).
The first exhibition of Weatherford's investigation will be presented at the Tang Museum of Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, in 2020, and will travel to the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, SITE Santa Fe and the Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego.
MARY WEATHERFORD
I'VE SEEN GRAY WHALES GO BY
SEPTEMBER 13 – OCTOBER 15, 2018
