Maggie Avolio
Region: MFA Annual
I am a New York–based artist working in multiple media. My
work conceptually deconstructs and subverts the conventions
of historically male-centric art. As a female artist, I integrate my
perspective and experience through a mixture of domestic craft
and art-historical references. By reimagining traditional painting
constructs, I challenge notions of technique, perspective, space,
dimensionality, and abstraction.
Through manipulations of material and space, I create
minimalistic artwork that exists simultaneously as painting,
sculpture, and installation. Raw canvas is unwoven, torn, folded,
or reconstructed to create three-dimensional form. I create marks
using unconventional methods like stitching. Paint is absent
from the canvas yet sometimes appears in the surrounding area,
creating a new spatial identity.
Through the transformation of the material and concept, new
forms emerge as a paradoxical opposite or otherness. The twodimensional
becomes three-dimensional. The soft becomes hard.
The part becomes the whole. The forgotten becomes present.