Magnolia Laurie

Region: South

Website: http://magnolialaurie.com/

City / State: Baltimore, MD

My current work is based in painting, yet I incorporate installation and drawing to explore the landscape, vantage point, the human instinct to build, and our complex relationship to the land. Free of people, the paintings depict gestures of the built environment as both literal evidence and metaphor for human impact.

The images often draw from history and current events, recomposing the remnants of forest fires, aerial views of flooded communities, and the billowing plumes of oil train derailments. These are events that have an impact on all of us in some way or another, although our opinions and views of them are shaped by our proximity, our needs, our losses, and our gains.

I work in sheer layers of oil paint that slip back and forth between gesture and illusion. The resulting images reveal a history of actions and erasures. The paintings evolve through a process of making and unmaking, much like the changing landscape and our evolving human history.