Marjorie Pierson: Floating in Place
November 16, 2017 – January 31, 2018
Opening: Saturday, Dec 2, 6pm – 9pm.

Marjorie Pierson‘s work explores rapidly evolving landscapes and our complex relationships with them. Inspired by photographer Richard Misrach and painter Gerhard Richter, Marjorie uses color photography, digital collage and mixed media to explore how we experience and explain environmental transformation. The visual narrative in this show weaves landscapes from her native south Louisiana with melting glacial fields in Alaska, the increasingly warm Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and evolving seascapes around the world.

Photographs of evolving bodies of water — various oceans, seas, freshwater lakes and salt water marshes — float on sugar cane, bamboo and watercolor papers. Landscapes are blurred in long, moving exposures, and blended in digital collages. Mixed media pieces begin with pigment prints on Japanese kozo (mulberry) paper, layered onto birch panels with oils, encaustic medium (beeswax with resin) and sometimes gold leaf.