reviews > Durham, NC

Maria Britton
Maria Britton

5/6/10 5:07 PM

What happens between the sheets is usually a private matter. The details of dreams, sex, rest, even fiction reading are rarely shared—and when they are, especially the sex and the dreaming, they tend to be represented crudely and all too literally. Maria Britton takes an alternate tack, one that is risky and magically successful. Using old floral bed sheets in place of canvas, she daubs and mushes stroke upon stroke of acrylic paint, creating dizzying, allover abstract compositions that in their most dense layering suggest intense, playful sex. Others, a bit more spare, carry repeated motifs that recall the way dreams repeat and return. Still others contain the suggestion of figuration and spatial structures, as dreams themselves do. The effect is a bit Carroll Dunham meets Philip Guston by way of Amy Sillman, and it is also entirely its own—as are the experiences each of us has between the sheets. Part of Britton’s brilliance here is in melding abstraction with something as familiar as worn sheets: the combination evocatively opens itself up to endless projection.

—Lori Waxman