In Michelle Benoit’s reductive and luminous Lucite sculptures, her color choices reference memory, personal experience, and a sense of place – she describes the work as a “tangible remembering.” In this new series Laminae, the artist’s process is akin to a geologist gathering core samples of the earth. Benoit, based in Providence, Rhode Island, literally excavated the walls of her childhood bedroom. The palette choices in her sculptures were derived from the layers of paint and wall paper she discovered in the core samples, which are recreated with acrylics, gouache, and other pigments and forever preserved under reclaimed bulletproof Lucite.
New York-based painter Marilyn Lerner creates vividly colorful, geometric abstract paintings in oil. Music is an important and meaningful experience in the creation of her work and informs the shapes as well as color choices in her paintings. Lerner has traveled extensively and drawn inspiration from Javanese court Gamelan music as well as Middle Eastern and Algerian Rai music. Rejecting any reliance on color theories or a systematic approach to geometric form, her process is instead intuitive, with one color choice leading to the selection of another. In the same manner, the presence of a dominant shape will give rise to other forms and patterns that emerge in her paintings. While symmetrical arrangements of geometries dominate her work, a closer look reveals that Lerner’s compositions are rarely mirror images.
Based in Birmingham, Alabama, Pete Schulte’s geometric drawings form the cornerstone of his artistic investigations, which also include sculpture, site-specific wall drawings, and installations. Working at small-scale in his drawings, Schulte’s pristine and nuanced compositions are predominately graphite but also include gouache, ink and pigment. He eschews mechanical processes and executes his drawings slowly and entirely by hand. His approach is intimate and intuitive, creating drawings of quiet strength, with one work often begetting the next. Schulte notes that, “without irony, I am attempting to craft a life-affirming response to the existential, political, social and ecological catastrophes that currently confront us.”
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