Strata

Claremont, California, USA - MFA student and artist Amanda Mears sent us a video of her MFA thesis exhibition after her school, Claremont Graduate School, closed it’s doors due to social distancing, and we are SO glad she did. This work is beautiful!

Amanda had the chance to hang her exhibition, but unfortunately it was not seen by the public. Below you will find a video walkthrough of the entire show, shot by videographer Anthony Penta and with music by Dominic Giam. Make sure you read the show statement below written by the artist herself, to enhance your experience even more!

STRATA

plural noun: a layer or a series of layers 

This is a show about layers and layering: paint layers, geological layers, layers of meaning.

The works in this show explore the idea of landscape as something ephemeral, fragile, anxious, mediated, specific and intimate.  They are rooted in my practice of drawing from life and photographing textures and shadow patterns. The paintings weave together elements of these drawings and photographs. Some details are amplified, others are subtracted, until a sense of place emerges. Line-work and manipulated photographic imagery combine with colour and pattern to investigate the powerful tension created between the universal and the particular, and the real and the imagined.

The paintings engage with humans’ intertwined relationship with the natural world, investigating via materials, mark-making and colour choices how we inscribe ourselves onto an idea of landscape.

My experience behind the camera in documentary has informed the process of making these paintings. The habit of looking, framing, recording and then editing has echoes in my process of gathering materials from my experience in nature and bringing them back to the studio to explore them more deeply.

I approached these paintings like poems, structuring them so that elements are not merely strung together for the sake of the thoughts they convey, but with an eye to patterns of similarity, opposition, rhythm and parallels. My painting process is associative and non-linear so that photo transfers of pavement cracks can draw to mind a rock face, spray paint can evoke a shadow, and pigment buckling the surface of collaged paper embodies rather than represents a sedimentary flow.  

The paintings are a place to investigate how materials and marks can be interlaced and overlapped to create spaces that defy logic yet somehow still make sense. Distinct moments and viewpoints are conflated into one delicately balanced construct: like a dream space whose elements are held in balance only in the mind of the dreamer.

Amanda Mears

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