JY&A 2020 Fall Art Salon | Mary Ann Strandell: Floating Steps
Time & Location
About
JY&A Art Salon 2020 Fall Salon | Mary Ann Strandell: Floating Steps
Online Exhibition
August 22 (12 AM GMT) to November 10 (11:59 PM GMT)
J. Yuan & Associates llc is pleased to present Floating Steps, an online solo exhibition by American artist Mary Ann Strandell, as our Art Salon Program. Strandell is known for her lush paintings of architectural structures and nature subjects, at times combined with objects circulated along ancient and modern trade routes. Presented as a virtual exhibition, this selection of works in Floating Steps reveals the fluid and mediated configuration of the observed reality with a certain level of fidelity to appearance. The liminal presence of these painted environs, both the interiors and cityscapes, connote a fractured space-time continuum embodied by the pictorial plane. Experiencing these works against the backdrop of quarantine as a new normal possesses silent omnipotence.
Strandell frequently denotes architectural wonders in New York City, such as the three-story glass staircase in the Apple Store, Chelsea, and construction sites, including the Hudson Yards development project on the west side of Manhattan. Her vibrant and dynamic representation of these locations evokes the melancholic beauty of empty cityscapes while simultaneously invites
re-imagination of one’s experiences related to the place. Her painting56 Leonard Street depicts the shell construction of Herzog & de Meuron’s masterwork in Tribeca. Its off-kilter design, painted with Strandell’s loose brushwork, poses a visual dialectic between a descending dissolution and an upward construction in process. In her paintings of modern living rooms, the mid-century sunken couch —also called the “conversation pit”—collides with icons from other eras and cultures, such as a sputnik lamp, a 15th-century Chinese vase, cocktails, and kitsch porcelain. The amalgam alludes to the long-existed, complex process of global exchange. By engineering her paintings and drawings into 3D lenticular media, Strandell disassembles spatial rendering to a cumulation of transitory imageries, interweaving multiple layers of visual narrative. The optical lens surface of the lenticular prints becomes an allegory of the computer screen, where hand adjustment is replaced by the virtual layers, activated by the viewer.