PRESS RELEASE
Maysey Craddock, Langsam Sea
Sep 10 – Oct 10, 2015
PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 1, 2015
Contact: info@searspeyton.com
Sears-Peyton Gallery
210 Eleventh Avenue, Suite 802
(between 24th + 25th Streets)
New York, NY 10001
Phone: 212.966.7469
TEN YEARS AFTER KATRINA, AN ARTIST REFLECTS ON THE GULF COAST
Exhibition Title: Maysey Craddock: Langsam Sea
Exhibition Dates: September 10 – October 10, 2015
Opening Reception: September 10 from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
New York, NY— As narratives of disaster and recovery proliferate with the approaching tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Maysey Craddock’s exhibition of recent paintings at Sears-Peyton Gallery evokes a different narrative of the Gulf Coast—not of sudden disaster, but of gradual, nearly imperceptible change over generations.
Langsam Sea, Craddock’s third solo exhibition in New York, borrows a phrase from poet Anne Michaels for its title. “Langsam” a German word for physical or procedural slowness here suggests languid days Craddock spent on Alabama’s Perdido Bay, where her family has gathered for generations. In Langsam Sea the artist renders the Gulf coastline as it slowly shifts from both natural and man-made forces. In these gouache paintings on found and stitched paper, Craddock offers viewers the chance to contemplate the Gulf Coast not from a circling FEMA helicopter, but from the artist’s tranquil place on a familiar—if vulnerable—shore.
Craddock based the works in Langsam Sea on photographs she took on Perdido Bay’s shoreline bristling with trees and rippling reflections. After pressing brown paper bags and stitching them together with silk thread, Craddock created abstract paintings of the wooded coastline and marshes. She calls her stitched paper surfaces “palimpsests” for the way they retain their history, a practice influenced by Bill Traylor’s use of found cardboard. Craddock’s process draws on the traditions of self-taught artists and landscape painters to render works that hover between object and representational plane.
In Craddock’s Saltlines the tree-lined shore turns vertical—a pale filigreed Rorschach baluster against a brown paper ground. In interlaced patterns of branches and their reflected doubles, Craddock renders a landscape that refuses to harden into permanence, writing, “I’m interested in the landscape of water/land as a site of constant change. Land disappears and is redeposited. A coastline is like an active ruin, constantly being reinvented.” In these works, Craddock offers a meditation on the inevitability of change and the comfort of the slowly churning sea always lapping the shore.
“Maysey Craddock: Langsam Sea” is on view September 10 – October 10, 2015 at Sears-Peyton Gallery’s Chelsea location at 210 Eleventh Avenue. An evening reception will take place September 10 from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. Sears-Peyton Gallery is open 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. Saturdays. For more information or to request further press images, please contact us at info@searspeyton.com.