Mary Larsen - Poetic Forms

July 29, 2023 - September 30, 2023

WAAM is pleased to present the two-person exhibition Mary Larsen: Poetic Forms and Carol Todaro: Object as Subject at Dimensions Variable. This exhibition features a selection of artwork, archives, and ephemera that explore the artistic journeys of two Miami-based artists. Larsen and Todaro excavate and unveil the intricate relationships between text, objects, and images through their multifaceted processes in distinct ways. The exhibition opens on July 29 and runs through September 2023. 

Dreamlike worlds collide in ethereal terrains in Mary Larsen’s paintings and altered books. Her paintings, conceived as  “dream-scapes”, underscore a foundational interplay of text and images. Larsen uses silkscreen, ink, and paint with found and reclaimed materials, remnants, maps, and fragments in multilayered ways.

The result is a palimpsest, where the real and the imagined converge in elaborate tapestries that weave together disparate elements and materials. The gesture of mapping, layering,  mark-making, erasing, and obscuring is the scaffolding that holds these worlds together.  It is an experience akin to ‘walking into consciousness’, where memory and perception intersect, and where internal and external words coalesce. The act of repurposing and reclaiming canvas, old paintings, discarded books, pages, letters, and other forms of tangible forms of knowledge symbolizes the act of rewriting or revisiting the topography of memory, where the possibilities of new histories may emerge.