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My work was with Portland Fine Art at the Affordable Art Fair.

" Bullseye Projects presents a group exhibition that explores ideation through the experimental art practices of three Northwest artists, featuring Anna Mlasowsky, Abi Spring, and Matthew Szösz."

http://www.bullseyeprojects.com/Exhibit_Detail.cfm?ShowsID=239

Awarded the Ford Foundation "Golden-spot" Residency at the Oregon College of Art and Craft Portland, OR

Images of my work were selected for the May 2014 issue # 35 of the New Glass Review, published by Corning Glass. Only 100 works were selected from over 2,000 image submissions.

Awarded Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts Residency.
During this residency I will be exploring, ice as a sculptural medium.

mocc.pnca.edu/archives/6700

cal.pnca.edu/e/793

The current body of work is the result of many years exploration in meditative mark making, process and the creation of objects that are records of process. In these current glass pieces I meditatively brush and drip liquid white glass enamel across the surface of a clear 6mm piece of glass sheet. Each sheet is allowed to dry and then stacked chronologically and fired into a single panel that holds the recorded marks. The history of the mark making is exposed because of the transparency of the material.

In 2007 I made a series of 8 x 8 foot white on white paintings that were the beginning of this exploration. I repetitively dripped white paint in rows across the surface of these large panels, allowing the marks to build up. The surface was then sanded down revealing the accumulated marks.

The illusion of depth caused by the subtle color interaction in this work and the affect that this had on the viewer, inspired me to explore the use of actual depth, first by using encaustic, then epoxy, and finally glass as painting medium.

Like the layers of glacial ice that hold records of atmospheric history each layer in this work reveals a record of the day it was made. I am interested in how an object imbues the process that was used to make them; how the resulting subtle layers, translucency, and opacity result in works that are mysterious, meditative, and engaging.

My work travelled with http://beauxartscontemporary.com/ to the Affordable Art Fair in New York this spring.

www.bullseyegallery.com/Shows-Detail.cf…

On The Surface

Work by

Kathryn Trigg - Paper
Joan Stuart Ross - Painting
Abi Spring - Glass

Reception May 19th at 11 AM.

315 Argyle St.
Friday Harbor, WA 98250

I am interested in the mysterious: the erased, painted over, cloudy, destroyed, ambiguous, muffled. A noise that I can barely hear draws my attention more than the blasting vibration of a siren. The siren makes me think for a second “What happened?” but the question is quickly answered “An accident.” Followed by sorrow, but then it is quickly forgotten. When I hear a quiet noise through the din of street sound and dogs barking: the scuffling of mice in the walls, or the sound of a sparrow hoping in the grass outside my window, my response is more engaged. “What is that sound?” I stop what I am doing and try to locate it, moving closer, hotter-colder-hotter, like the children’s game, until I can locate the source. I want to create a similar experience of prolonged investigation with my work. “What did I just see?” I want the viewer to ask. I want them to pause, wonder, move around and have a physical relationship with the object. When I listen to music, a piece like Beethoven’s Pathètique, affects me in a way that I can only describe as physical. It is something that I can feel just thinking about that piece of music: something that I cannot even come close to describing with words. I am intrigued by experiences that escape semiotic interpretation. I want to create work that goes around the language part of the brain and goes directly to the heart. One thing I believe is responsible for creating this kind of experience is inherent contradiction. In an article about Agnes Martin by Anna C. Chave in the catalogue from Agnes Martin’s 1992 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City, Chave compares Agnes Martin’s work to the short story by Isak Denison (née Karen Blixen) “The Blank Page.” This story is about a convent where the nuns collect bed linens stained by local princesses when the princesses are deflowered on their matrimonial beds. The stained fabric is framed, labeled with the princess’s name and hung on the monastery walls where it is contemplated by the nuns. The story goes that there is only one unlabeled frame, one that contains a clean piece of linen. It is this clean white surface that the nuns contemplate most often. Chave goes on to write that “The Blank Page” is a subversive act, and here she quotes Susan Gubar on the subject, “the blank page becomes radically subversive, the result of one woman’s defiance which must have cost either her life or her honor. ” implying that this anonymous princess was not a virgin and was probably disowned, if not worse, for her act. I have another reading of “The Blank Page.” Could it be that the nuns’ attraction to this unstained sheet is a response to their own state? They have chosen to marry Christ, and will never conjugate the relationship in the traditional sense. Thus the white sheet becomes a representation of their state of purity. The power of this story is that the blank white surface has the most layers of meaning. It is a sign of purity and transgression simultaneously. The irreconcilability of these potentials holds us suspended in between them in a state of not being certain, and holds us in mystery. The contradictions in my work hold the viewer in between, in mystery. I work in between the fields of Fine Art and Craft. I use glass, a medium often associated with craft to make paintings. When people look at my work they often don’t know what they are made of. When I paint it is process intensive, like Craft. I work between painting and sculpture, considering three-dimensionality, but the work hangs on the wall. I work between the visible and the invisible; the work is often high value, low contrast, contains areas obscured by transparent and opaque layers. Areas are built up and ground down, covered and uncovered, made and erased. I believe that these conflicting elements help engage the viewer in the work, suspending them momentarily in a world of feeling rather than thought. I try as much as possible, as E. B. White said, to “Be obscure clearly.”