Color Group

The Barn Project is pleased to present Color Group, a show featuring works by seven women artists: Martha Clippinger, Ash Ferlito, Stacy Fisher, Katy Kirbach, Kaitlin Zorah McDonough, Ilse Sørensen Murdock, and Maria Stabio. 

Over the last four years, these artists have convened on a monthly basis to read, discuss, and expand their understanding of color. Color for most may relate to their intuition, which itself is guided by subjective experiences like family, geography, culture, fashion, politics, nature, the body among a dozen other variables to list. The artists in Color Group consider these inputs and together engage with writings on the topic as it’s been interpreted by poets, filmmakers, artists, and theorists. Through study and conversation they work through canonical texts such as Wittgenstein's Remarks on, or Goethe’s Theory of, Color and contemporary works from thinkers such as Julia Kristeva, Maggie Nelson, Bridget Riley, Elaine Scarry. 

A generative source of ideas has been Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater’s Thought Forms, published in 1910. Besant was a theosopher who posited that thoughts possess forms which appear as color and shape. The book contains illustrations of individual thoughts and emotions; visualizing such states, for example, as: “Sudden Fright” or “The Intention to Know.” Besant believed color, as thought form, can have real influence in the physical world, with artists potentially able to affect the auras of those around them, accessing spiritual or metaphysical levels. In turn the artists in Color Group actively contend with color in their work, through regular sharing of new concepts and insights to more acutely perceive it, ultimately impacting each other’s color sensibilities and works.

Charting this course, the way image and emotion shift between these paintings, is the pleasure and possibility this show presents. Installed atop the dark and natural wood tones of the barn interior, the paintings in Color Group operate within a more life-like, even rustic environment in contrast with the usual stark white cube. The barn receives brilliant summer light and nestled within the broader idyllic setting of coastal Maine, attenuates the viewer more sharply to receiving and feeling these works. 

Martha Clippinger calls her works “tapetitos” which is Spanish for small rugs. She makes them in collaboration with weavers, Licha González Ruiz and Agustín Contreras López of Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico, using hand-dyed wool. The weavings, incorporating colors that highly contrast in both hue and value, are largely inspired by experiences of color and light in Mexico. A red façade neighboring a green one, or fuchsia bougainvillea climbing a turquoise wall, or the stark two-tone effect on a surface, where mid-day sun creates intense light and shade. 

Ash Ferlito uses color in her work as a way to embody the spirit of nature. Beyond representation color is a means for recording sensory experience. In her Wildscape series, Ferlito soaks fabric with highly pigmented paint and homemade plant dyes, creating bleeds of color and marks with collected materials like dandelion, fleabane and pokeweed. The results of these experiments combine the sensitivity of a naturalist with the energy of AbEx painting.

Stacy Fisher describes her color choices as being guided by their functional properties and a desire to contrast highly saturated colors with neutral ones. Structural aspects of her work, such as the shadows and edges of multi-part panels which she builds and paints to look uniform, create a bodily, geometric experience united by a drawn line and visible brushwork.  

Katy Kirbach paints strips of canvas and linen and weaves them together to create an overall patterned structure, which is both the surface and composition of the painting. Using fluorescent paint on the back of her works, a colored reflection bounces onto the wall and is visible in gaps in the woven structure. Her paintings are often attempts to respond to, or “capture”, these fleeting reflections.

Kaitlin Zorah McDonough describes color as a set of highly specific frequencies which she uses as the guiding directional force throughout her painting process. Colors land for her with resounding clarity and specificity, resonating with the tone, qualities, and essence of each painting's subject. McDonough uses found substrates and integrates collage into her paintings, so that material and color become closely linked, tactile and felt, in works she describes as “etheric portraits.”

Ilse Sørensen Murdock paints plein air. Working with her color palette foregrounded on the painted surface, she assimilates visual fragments of nature and incorporates sensory colors from changing light. Finding beauty and color clues in refuse and from her inventory of collected plastic bottle caps–a practical library of found color–she looks for resonances that occur between industrial plastics and the organic pigment of oil color. Her formal exploration becomes a conduit to express deeper feelings regarding human’s relationship to nature.   

Maria Stabio integrates shape, pattern, and transparency into vibrant, graphic tableaux that suggest botanical or weather systems. Stabio’s relationship with color shifted upon leaving New York to visit family in the Philippines. There, she realized color was a default, obvious choice and an endless celebration of vitality. This dual sensibility, a collision of cultures, is imbued in the energy of her paintings which integrate black and white alongside passages of high-chroma.