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Mayme Kratz is an expert in the use of resin, creating from this difficult material, and from the vast collection of specimens she collects and embeds within it, diverse works of textural and atmospheric intensity. Cast and finished with academic precision, and studded with castaways from the natural world, a Mayme Kratz piece is a window onto secret biological systems, glowing beneath the moody translucence of a resinous surface.
Kratz distills metaphorical value from the fronds of grass, snake moultings, bones, pods and thistles she finds on her frequent outings in the desert and mountain terrains of the Southwest. When encased in sculptures and wall pieces, fixed forever in poetic constellations of the artists own devising, these objects serve as the physical remains and spiritual offerings in the artist’s startlingly beautiful contemporary reliquaries.
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Marie Navarre incorporates printed imagery and photography as a material rather than a medium. Her recent works, which are minimal and exquisitely composed, seem to come from outside of the realm of human observation and reality. They are instead discrete odes to a moment in time or an overlay of experiences—an extraordinary notion that briefly passes into existence and then away again, into the realm of dreams.
Marie Navarre’s enigmatic constructions use a range of materials—rare vellums with digital surfaces, rag paper, pages and endpapers from old books, soot, and silk thread. Navarre has been working as an artist who both uses and subverts conventional photography for over two decades. Navarre comments of her newest body of work:
"For me this work is about how we come to know, or search for ways to know what we are in a deep sense of the word. I am considering a wordless kind of knowing. The originally blank end sheets feel full of handheld energy. The occasional stray marks or erased words are very rich to me."
Top: Mayme Kratz
Falling Star, 2012, resin and grass on panel, 48" x 48"
Shadow Moon, 2013, resin and seeds on panel, 24" x 24"
Below: Marie Navarre
here, now, 2013, digital print on vellum, digital print on rag paper, rag paper, colored paper, silk thread, 46.25" x 37.75", edition of 15
present absence, 2013, found, de-acidified paper, digital print on vellum, soot, graphite, rag paper, 10" x 7.5", edition of 15
