:


OFFSPRINGS: Mare Martin
deNatured : Brian Guidry

Opening: Friday March 12, 6 - 9 pm
Exhibition Dates: March 12 to April 3


Oak Kingdom, 2022 oil on linen 16" x14"


OFFSPRINGS: Mare Martin

Mare Martin (AKA Mary Martin Allbritton) was born in South Louisiana of Cajun descent and grew up on a small farm. Her father worked for the Department of Agriculture and their whole family of seven took part in a full farming experience. This environment instilled in Martin a passionate love of nature. She is inspired by the forms and dynamics of the plant, animal, and mineral realms and their connection with the earth, heavens, seasons and elements. Her work is a celebration and visual translation of individual and archetypal manifestations of Nature.

Martin graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette with a BFA in painting and printmaking. She also studied at the Haystack School of Art in Maine on scholarship, and at the Cardiff College of Art in Wales on a graduate fellowship. Her professional awards include a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts for a mid-career retrospective. Martin created the site-specific public artwork "Earth, Water, Fire, Air" for the glass wall at the Lafayette Regional Airport. She has exhibited in the American Embassy in London; "Major Works" 84 World's Fair in New Orleans, LA; Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans; New Orleans Museum of Art; Harwood Museum in Taos, New Mexico; Hilliard University Museum in Lafayette, LA. and most recently a thirty-five year retrospective at the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette, LA. She has lived and worked in Louisiana, New Mexico, Wales, Spain, Canada, and Morocco, and exhibited her work nationally and internationally. She currently lives and works in Opelousas, Louisiana.
www.maremartin.com



.
Greenbrier, 2022 acrylic on linen 20" x16.5"


deNatured : Brian Guidry

Reoccurring themes of technology and the forces that animate the world around us can be found in Brian Guidry's paintings, which range visually from compressed lines of color to abstract eruptions. Guidry synthesizes color, sound and texture to create "digitized" or "dissolved landscapes," using a specific color palette sampled from a variety of natural sources.

"The line paintings are like recordings synthesized from the landscape. The layers of the composition move and shift so that their relationships to each other are constantly changing. I want the viewer's eye to move across the surface like a needle in the groove of a record, ricocheting back and forth in perpetual motion. Optically and structurally these paintings maintain a polarized organization. I start composing a painting with a single line as a strip of color information. The rest of the lines unfold intuitively thereafter following the structural network. Each line is carefully hand-lined with a brush."

Guidry graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette with a BFA in painting. He received his MFA in painting form Pratt Institute, Brooklyn,NY. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Selected exhibitions include: The Bronx Museum, New York; Gana Art Space, Seoul, Korea; The Odgen Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; The Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, and the National Collage of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan. Guidry’s work has been featured and discussed in Time Out Chicago, Artforum, The Times-Picayune, Gambit Weekly, Pelican Bomb, The New York Times, and New American Paintings. His work is in the collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art; The Odgen Museum of Southern Art; National College of Arts, Lahore; New York Public Library, New York; Pratt Institute Library, Brooklyn; and Paul & Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum, Lafayette.

www.brianguidry.com
Instagram: @b_k_guidry