Stacks on Stacks, March 3-31, 2022
Margie E. West Gallery, University of Georgia
Artists: Mark Brosseau, Martha Clippinger, Susan Klein
Stacks on Stacks presents the work of three artists from the Carolinas working in abstraction–Mark Brosseau, Martha Clippinger, and Susan Klein. The artists explore the relationships of shape and color through various media including painting, ceramics, wood, and textiles. Together, their investigations of hue, line, and form stack against each other, generating a rhythm that echoes throughout the gallery.
Imbued with curiosity, the work plays between order and intuition. As Brosseau says, “I was drawn to the kinds of questions whose answers were another set of questions, not a solution to a problem.” The forms that emerge hold an evocative yet strange familiarity. Clippinger’s textiles and wood reliefs skew the repetition of their geometric construction. Orchid purple and tangerine stripes zip in imperfect alignment on a chartreuse ground. Fuschia weaving cascades over stepped cobalt and earthy brown.
Klein’s ceramics also take up this rhythmic density. They stack together, patterned with zigzags, stripes, checkerboard, and triangles. The objects form new compositions through relationships of physical precarity. A vessel sprouts tenuous arms; a ritualistic pile leans off-center. The impression of destabilizing structures comes through again in Brosseau’s black and white paintings. Behind the angular lines, gray haze suggests erasure, giving an impression of moving through ephemeral moments. The solutions are shifting, responsive, and accumulated. As in memory and making, each instance builds upon the last.
