Marischa Slusarski‘s new series, “Across the Floors of Silent Seas,” is a riotous convergence of form and color explored through large-scale abstract paintings, 3-D collages, and augmented digital photos.
Slusarski employs seemingly discordant materials and an often psychedelic palette to present works exploring line, texture, and natural forms. The multi-dimensional pieces recede and unfurl with shapes reminiscent of mollusks, serpentine emissions, tentacled cephalopods, and scampering centipedes. The elements synthesize to create a Neptunian glimpse into the preternatural.
The confluence of abstraction and sci-fi prompts the viewer to imagine what scuttles across the deep sea floors, between the surreptitious cracks and mystic crevices sandwiched between a foundation of eye candy shenanigans and irreverence.
Painter, photographer, sculptor and designer Marischa Slusarski portrays the geography and inhabitants of a world that, while imaginary, speaks directly to the poetic, whimsical and emotional fabric of our own.
Slusarski has always used a variety of media to give form and flesh to her menageries. Her early, deeply textured and painterly works depicting sexualized familial groups of anatomically anomalous forest creatures were grounded in an almost classical approach to stylized realism and muscular painting technique. Her latest works on paper and canvas build from those sensual surfaces of pigment and marble dust, adding other kinds of image-making, including vibrating post-folk line drawing and a black rain of text-based typography transfers, in an approach that is more illustrative, more self-consciously symbolic and emotionally raw. -Shana Nys Dambrot
