MARIELLA BISSON: SUNLIGHT, WATER AND GRAVITY On View at the Arsenal Gallery Through 6/18
Mariella Bisson's large-scale mixed media paintings of waterfalls in New York's Hudson Valley are coupled with her preparatory drawings and watercolors in Sunlight, Water and Gravity. The exhibition is on view from April 30 through June 18, 2015 in the Arsenal Gallery, located in NYC Parks' headquarters in Central Park.
Bisson's paintings, created with hundreds of pieces of layered paper and measuring up to eight feet long, are poised on the edge of abstraction and representation. The overlapping paper replicates the texture of rushing water and rock strata, yet the forms remain simple and geometric. Motion, gravity, and the endlessness of geological time are as much the subject of Bisson's paintings as the actual waterfalls.
The paintings of waterfalls are exhibited alongside their preceding watercolor fieldworks in order to share her artistic process with viewers. She hikes to remote wooded locations in New York's Catskills and sketches nature's immediacy and motion in various seasons and lights. Back in her studio, Bisson then translates her watercolors into full-scale paintings, composed with collaged paper, and oil paint on linen.
It is no coincidence that Bisson's romantic landscapes evoke the paintings of the Hudson River School. She was born in northern Vermont in a house owned by Robert Frost and her lifelong obsession with painting was fostered by her local library, The St. Johnsbury Athanaeum. She spent her days with a remarkable world-class collection of Hudson River paintings - including Albert Bierdstadt's largest work, and landscapes by Thomas Cole, Sanford Gifford and Asher Durand. Those paintings and the rugged beauty of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom are still very present in her visual memory.
Mariella Bisson received her BFA from Pratt Institute in New York and her MA in Museum Education from Bank Street College of Education. Her work can be found in notable private collections such as The Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering; the Mayo Clinic; White & Case, LLP; the Rutgers National Print Archive and the Pfizer Corporation. Bisson has received grants from the Joyce Dutka and Ludwig Vogelstein Foundations. In 2012 she won a Fellowship in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). She won her first Pollock Krasner in 1990, and is a 2014 and 2015 Pollock Krasner Foundation Fellow.
The Arsenal Gallery is dedicated to examining themes of nature, urban space, wildlife, New York City parks and park history. It is located on the third floor of the NYC Parks' headquarters, in Central Park, on Fifth Avenue at 64th Street. Gallery hours are Monday to Friday, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Admission is free. For more information on the Arsenal Gallery, please visit http://www.nycgovparks.org/art-and-antiquities/arsenal-gallery.
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