Marie Thibeault

Gallery Affiliations: Jancar Gallery, George Lawson Gallery

Region: Pacific Coast

During the past decade I have focused on creating epic paintings, which address the ideas of flux, change and instability in our environment. This particular group paintings was begun as a response to the Katrina disaster and has evolved into a series, which addresses the general condition of landscape in collapse.

I consider landscape's most crucial conditions to be both space and time. The space in these works is a constructed one. Multiple viewpoints and contradictory spaces join together to create a sense of suspension and a state of transformation. The space is a hybrid space where freehand imaginative drawing collides with specific visual information referenced from photographs. In this collision there is a slippage of sorts, where perspectival elements lift and breathe in relationship to the open painterly field. The images may appear to be about destruction and indeed, to a degree they are. However, although, the chaotic debris field is the apparent structure, it is the ordering of this chaos that is most informative in communicating a state of time and transition.

My pursuit is to create an image that alternates between the conditions of collapse and cohesion, where the experience of stability and instability oscillate, a place where very complex and contradictory information is held in arrest.