Culture
Laurel McMechan To Show Artwork At OU-Eastern
By: EJ Schodzinski
Posted on:
Boston artist Laurel McMechan will be exhibiting her artwork at the Ohio University Eastern Art Gallery through Oct. 23. The opening reception for the exhibit will be held on Wednesday, Oct. 15, from 11 a.m. to noon and from 5 to 7 p.m.
The exhibit, Folded Mountains, will showcase her talents in abstract paintings made with acrylic, oil and gouache.
“My current work explores invented landscape in search of an expanded idea of place,” said McMechan. “The imagery is born as a collision of worlds; I use collage as metaphor for the overlap of virtual and visceral parts of our daily life.”
The artist continued, “My work is inspired by a simultaneous experience of the worlds we make inside our heads and the exterior physical world and community we occupy with our bodies. Technology mediates our perception of our landscape in strange ways. Glitches in Google satellite imagery present our landscape behaving in unexpected ways, like aerial imagery of a major highway that dips and curls with the fluidity of ribbon instead of the rigidity of engineered concrete and steel.
“My work proceeds iteratively to mediate and abstract multiple versions of a place through the process of making the paintings themselves. My process pays homage to the tradition of still life painting as a way of exploring our hybrid virtual/physical experience of our world enabled by technology and networks.”
McMechan’s favorite paintings include Folded Ridgeline and Topograph.
“These paintings began to transform into new landscapes themselves, different from the others,” said the artist. “They are the seeds of what is to come in my next body of work.”
McMechan’s work has been exhibited at the International Print Center New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Fort Collins, Colo., and the Harwood Art Center in Albuquerque, N.M. Her work resides in private and public collections in the United States and abroad, including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Rhode Island School of Design and University of Richmond Museums. Her entire collection can be viewed at http://laurelmcmechan.com/.
McMechan credits her personal experiences and educational background as major influences on her work. The artist was born in Denver, Colo., and currently lives and works in Boston.
She has extensive travel experiences nationally and abroad, including visits to France, Germany and Spain. McMechan graduated with a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Denver and also earned an master of fine arts degree from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design. She currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the Massachusetts College of Art & Design.
McMechan is looking forward to the exhibition at OUE.
“I am very excited to share my work with the students, faculty and larger university community,” she said. “Giving our young artists opportunities to experience artwork in real time and in real physical space is such an important resource for their education.”
The Ohio University Eastern Art Gallery is located on the second floor of Shannon Hall and is open to the public from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays and from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Admission is free. For more information, contact sagew@ohio.edu or (740) 699-2342.