This a bit of a studio update/blog post. If you're on my mailing list you may have received it. If you're not on my mailing list, and feel shorted for finding this out second-hand, shoot me an email posthaste and I'll add you.
I am pleased to announce that "
Mystic Hovercraft,
" has been purchased for the Music City Center Collection and is now installed. And a shout out to Veronica Kavass and the Nashville Scene for highlighting my painting in an article she wrote about the collection:
Mary Addison Hackett, Mystic Hovercraft
As a painter, Hackett is a poet. In a sense, her painting shows the collection's true scope because it does not conjure Nashville. It captures the viewer's gaze not because it depicts something local, but because the artist commands her use of color, space, the movement of lines, the expression of the composition. If this happens to be connected to a Southern landscape, then so be it; it could just as well be the Alpine foothills in 1910. This work may be inspired by a sense of place, but it is not distinctly about it. It exists on its own as the work of a painter who knows how to transfer her experience to the canvas without being too explicit.
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| Mystic Hovercraft, 2008, oil and acrylic on canvas |
I love the "Alpine Foothills in 1910" reference. So perfect. Being someone who has spent every decade of their life as an artist in a different city, I've found it difficult to form a consistent identity with a specific place, at least as far as labels go. Perhaps because of this, a sense of place continues to infiltrate much of my art, whether it be abstract or figurative, or while working in Los Angeles or Nashville, or wherever.
In Los Angeles, you can see some of my work as part of the public arts installation, "Levitational" at LAX in Terminal 3, and then grab a drink at Encounter while mulling over the art. I completed a series of 20 watercolors titled, "Levitating Sticks and Rocks." They look something like this:
The show was curated by John David O'Brien and will be up through December of 2013.
"Levitational"
The guiding concept for Levitational is to exhibit art works in which gravity is clearly defied, either in practice or in appearance. Defying gravity has long been linked to magic and states of wonder. It has also been integral to the success of art forms in which the magnetic forces that draw everything down to the planet are momentarily suspended whether in reality or in the mind's eye. It is coincidentally also how take off and flight are achieved. Taking advantage of this overlap is at the core of this proposal for LAX.
The artists selected for inclusion in this exhibition, Wendy Adest, Kimber Berry, Daniel Brodo, Margaret Griffith, Mary Addison Hackett, Rebecca Ripple, Steve Roden and Joseph Santarromana/Erika Suderburg, work with a mixture of drawings, paintings, mixed media works, video and sculpture to address the condition of seeming weightless-ness or how gravity is defied. The artists in this exhibition have themselves been interested over time in the mysteriousness and history of levitational forces. They present work of theirs in which levitational forces play an important role in the viewer's experience of the art.
The intent is also to reference and key into the state of dreams and daydreams in which the laws of physics are often suspended momentarily. It is also an invitation to the passerby to ponder for a moment the power (of the imagination) that allows us to conquer gravity through flight.
-John David O'Brien
* I was a little surprised at exactly how obvious a connection there is between "Mystic Hovercraft" and "Levitating Sticks and Rocks." 5 years apart. Uncanny, no? And even more strange is that "Mystic Hovercraft" was painted in my Culver City studio and now hangs in Nashville, while the "Levitating Sticks and Rocks" were painted in Nashville and are hanging in Los Angeles. How's that for symmetry?
