A week in Times. The 50-panel series as montage.

Here’s a quick look at my 50-panel painting project chronicling the pandemic. What started as a way to express my outrage at the upheaval during this time grew to become an anchor, holding me steady to take in the event’s day-to-day. Using the front page of the New York Times as a scaffolding, I replaced one image in the newspaper with a color from the sky while writing the photo’s caption at the bottom of each panel. Mixing beauty and news of the day in a panel the size of the newspaper.

A few captions from the series: “Mourners laid flowers and notes on the steps of the Supreme Court on Friday night after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 9.20.2020”, “A week in Times. 11.15.2020 Democracy at Risk. Refrigerated trailers are being used as morgues by El Paso’s medical examiner’s office.”, and “President Biden, with Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday night, became the first president to address Congress with two women behind him as the next officials in the line of succession. “Our government still works,” he said. 4.29. 2021 First 100 days #100”

The variation in image quality and exposure is due to not being able to reach my photographer for professional photographs during the pandemic. They are all on the same white resin panels, each is 22” x 12”, the size of the front page of the NY Times.

In Praise of Form: Towards a New Post-Humanist Art

I’m honored to have my artwork included as an example for the thesis of Taney Roniger in her current essay, In Praise of Form, published online in Interalia Magazine.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“…a post-humanist art would be one of transcendence. For with the thinker that thought itself into the center of the world silenced, we become living organisms again just like all others, participating in, and exquisitely sensitive to, the dynamic flux of the natural world.”

The full article is available here, generously provided without paywall by Interalia:

In Praise of Form: Towards a New Post-Human Art

“The Wind Turning in Circles Invents the Dance,” 2019. Acrylic on acrylic panel, 19″ x 18″.

Installation images of "Painting Time" Exhibition. At Brattleboro Museum through September 24th

My solo exhibition, Painting Time, curated by Mara Williams, opened on Friday June 22nd and will run through September 24.

One the wall, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter : Yellow Trail. Each 20 x 30 inches, acrylic on museum board, 2014. Each band of color is recreated from one in nature and placed on the painting in the order in which they were found on the hiking trail they were collected on.

A video is available here:

More information available here: Brattleboro Museum

Three Shelf Redder

“Three Shelf Redder” Exhibition Opens at Space 325/325, April 15, 7-9pm

 Gallery Hours: Saturday & Sunday 4/16, 22, 23, 29, 30 1-4pmor by appointment with the artists.

This body of work is in keeping with my previous conceptually driven explorations of color yet offers a new strain of exploration, transposing words to color. The paintings are crude, on purpose, showing their failure, expressing time and adjustments.

from the press release:

Ridgewood, NY, April 9, 2017

Two women arrive at a party, are introduced to one another by the host who suggests a kinship between their work. Studio visits are arranged, the mutual intersection within the work is realized, an offer to exhibit comes forward.

The meaning of words, mountains, nature, memory, amplifying structures and colors are the crossover points between the work of Shen and Ramsay.

Debra Ramsay’s artwork is conceptually rigorous and process-oriented. The idea comes first; the search for materials, methods and procedures that will best support the idea follows. For “Three Shelf Redder” Ramsay is introducing a body of work created from obscure and off-beat definitions of color, sourced from The Dictionary of Colour, by Ian Paterson. “Redder,” for example, is the title of a painting based on the only palindromic color word in the English language. These monochromatic paintings work with color and light, as their translucent supports and layers of colors react with the ambient light. Ramsay is concerned with many of the principles the Light and Space artists of the 60’s as well as the humor that can be packed in conceptual art such as in the work of contemporary artist Spencer Finch.

Hilda Shen’s new sculptures are small, displayed in a way that emphasizes our physical reaction to scale.  One leans in to focus and scrutinize the details, and there is an urge to touch these glazed ceramic pieces.  There are two projects which are developed here:  “Range of Mountains” reinterprets the tradition of Chinese scholar rocks as objects of contemplation; “Northwest” is inspired by Shen’s studies of Pacific Northwest forests, the transformation of energy from immense decaying nurse logs to young saplings. In “Three Shelf Redder” Shen continues her long-standing interest in landscape and the reciprocal influence of culture and nature.