Normal, IL
In the video, a young woman wearing a modest black bikini kneels on the floor, surrounded by large sheets of white paper. One by one she picks them up, crumples them and shoves them into a bucket of water. Standing, she sprinkles water, tears the remaining sheets, and covers her head with wet paper until she disappears. Marisa Boyd is that woman, an artist who otherwise paints all-over abstract pictures that feel at once impressionistic and chaotic. How to reconcile her ritualistic gestures with her painterly ones? Pragmatically it’s about paper: Boyd has begun to make her own, for use in her paintings, and pulping fiber is the beginning of that process. But there’s something more, something that has to do with the body and life of the artist and a desire to acknowledge them, a corporeal existence not easy to perceive in the kind of paintings Boyd makes. In the past, artists as diverse as Yves Klein and Rebecca Horn have struggled with the relationship between body and painting—a struggle that continues here, in the work of Marisa Boyd.
—Lori Waxman 3/26/16 12:24 PM