Skip to main content

Debra Ramsay at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center

Installation view of Debra Ramsay's Painting Time

 From the Press Release:

 You might be surprised to learn that this installation— comprising a profusion of colorfully painted and curled strips that pile, unfurl, and tumble across the floor—is a landscape. Yes, a landscape.

Debra Ramsay generates a strict set of rules to guide her creative process for each new body of work. For this installation, she distilled her daily walks in the woods to pure color. What you are seeing is her color record across four seasons.
Painting Time is at once reductionist and exuberant. While Ramsay reduces the complexity of color change in nature to momentary snap- shots over a year of seasons, the swirling heaps of color evoke nature’s abundance.

That the conceptual rigor of her work doesn’t overpower the aesthetic pleasure of the experience is a testament to Ramsay’s artistic power. Painting Time exists in the aesthetic realm—a place where interpretation is nuanced and fluid, and where understanding can deepen each time an artwork is experienced, revisited, or discussed.

— Mara Williams, Chief Curator


This artwork is about time. I used the landscape as a time- keeping device by documenting the change in its colors at the same location in New Berlin, New York, over the course of a year. I think of the work as a pure landscape, reduced to the actual colors I found there.

To make the work, I first captured colors from nature photographically. I returned to the same trail in the forest in the spring, summer, fall, and winter of one year. Each time I walked the trail, I took a photo every 100 steps, resulting in 18 photos on each walk. I then selected one color from each photo to translate into a paint color. Seventy-two distinct colors mark this year of time.

As I worked on this project, I was reminded of Josef Albers’s statement: “There is a profound harmony in the immeasurable spectrum of color.”

— Debra Ramsay



Debra Ramsay: Painting Time
June 22 - September 24, 2018
Brattleboro Museum & Art Center
10 Vernon Street
Brattleboro, VT 05301
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Justine Rivas at The Valley

Installation view: Justine Rivas, How to Carry a Cloud. Photo courtesy of The Valley   Justine Rivas: How to Carry a Cloud Up through August 7, 2021 The Valley 1800 Camino del La Placita, Unit D Taos, NM 87571 From the Press Release: The Valley is pleased to present its first solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based painter Justine Rivas . The exhibition, titled  How to carry a cloud,  includes a series of new paintings that explore hidden sources of water in the desert landscape. Rivas uses clouds and creosote bushes as metaphors for the interconnected sources of life-giving moisture in arid regions. Both reflect water stored in the land and the air, deceptively close and yet inaccessible. Cloud forms appear across several works, oscillating between pattern and landscape. As above, so below- creosote in its various forms appear as a familiar and familial plant speaking to the artists’ connection to the desert landscape, her family has lived in the borderlands since t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Current Show at Galerie Victor Sfez - On View Through April 23

EXHIBITION OF 19 MARCH TO 23 April 2016 DANIEL G. HILL develops a sensitive geometry. He chooses fragile materials that he weaves, knots, suspends, sometimes playing with the influence of gravity, which he uses to his advantage. A keen observer, he seizes the moment and the detail to create work of unusual and poetic balance. JOCELYNE SANTOS is a color magician. As much in her paintings as in her sculptures, contrasting tones are juxtaposed with harmony, giving birth to unexpected chromatic variations. We never complete our discovery of her palette. New nuances invite surprise, illusions dazzle our eyes, and that which is hidden in the work ends up being its main concern. SHAWN STIPLING works with perception. Space is always present, suggested by clever crossings and misleading offsets that generate new virtual planes. The simplicity of his line is only an appearance: executed by hand, it still takes on a deliberately mechanical look. Confiding to us, the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Brenda Goodman @ Life on Mars

  Installation view with Almost a Bride , 2015 (rt.)   Almost a Bride , 2015, oil on wood, 80 x 72 in. Almost a Bride , 2015 (detail) Brenda Goodman continues to plumb the depths of her own, as well as our collective unconscious in this staggering exhibition of major, new paintings.  Goodman, once again presents a very personal narrative brought to life through intimate and unexampled forms that are both guarded, and set afloat by a limited palette of muted and gemlike colors. Brenda Goodman: New Work is on view through April 19 when Life on Mars will present an Artist's Talk between Goodman and the poet and critic John Yau. The event will be moderated by Michael David and will take place between 2 - 4 PM. For more images follow the link below . . . . 
3 comments
Read more