Mary Robinson-Confluence

June 16 to August 19

Mary Robinson’s exhibition, Confluence: Monoprints and Mixed Media Works on Paper, brings together different modes of working and contrary gestures. Robinson mixes and remixes printmaking matrices, and cuts and reconfigures paintings and collages, to see relationships freshly. This continual composing, decomposing, and recomposing reflects the way Robinson experiences the world, where circumstances can change quickly—technology is developing rapidly, political situations can suddenly flip, and the natural environment is breaking down at an alarming pace. Her cyclical process of breaking forms apart and layering or gluing them back together mirrors desires for both order and chaos.

Robinson created the monoprints in this exhibition from stencils and matrices, hand-cut from wood and other materials, and also printed from the leftover or negative cut shapes. These prints have gone through the press several times to build up translucent and opaque layers of color. Robinson’s method of printing with scraps coincides with parallel practices of collage and collage-like painting. There is a constant dialogue between the bodies of work: some of the collages contain cut-up prints, and often the collages and paintings become “sketches” or springboards for new prints.