Flowering Plants: Maggie Cedarstrom

RECEPTION:
April 21, 2018 from 6-8 PM

ON VIEW:
April 21, 2018 to April 28, 2018 Saturdays from 12-4 PM

“Flowering Plants: Maggie Cedarstrom” presents paintings and drawings culled from the emotional landscape. On view for a week, April 21 to 28, Cedarstrom’s work centers around organic forms, the body and private space made public. Large scale figurative paintings show muscle, tenderness and tension. The opening reception is April 21, beginning at 6 pm, at the Washington Street Gallery, 321 Washington Street, just outside Union Square, Somerville.

 

Many of the patterns that inhabit the images in this show are taken from domestic objects. Patterns of flowers are pulled from a living room couch cushion as well as a bathrobe.

 

Some of the floral patterns become their own worlds, as is “White Roses” where a piece of face, in particular an ear, floats as if in water in the blue, white and pink nebulous space created from the abstracting of the floral pattern. Sometimes the figures inhabit a nonfictional space, as in “Velvet Chair” where the figure, in a floral sweater, is held by a velvet flock armchair, seemingly in a brief moment of repose.

 

The figures adapt to, confront and redirect the spaces they inhabit. The flowers and forms sometimes engulf, sometimes caress.

 

This show serves as a prelude to a show of the artist’s late sister’s paintings and drawings, on view this coming August. Many of the images in this show, says Cedarstrom, are imagist letters to Caitlyn Cedarstrom Morris, part of a conversation with motifs and subjects that both artists were (are) inspired by. Some patterns in the current show are taken from books left to the artist from Caitlyn Morris’ collection.