A solo exhibition by Mary Toscano
Alice Gallery
September 16 – November 11, 2022
Opening reception | September 16, 6-8 pm
Mary Toscano’s latest work, In Solution, is a series of four landscape drawings—A house partially sunk in a pond, a man-made swimming pool with a cavernous void at the bottom, a stone monument with water flowing over its base, a shoreline with a lone chair and no beachgoers. Each drawing contains detailed renderings of worn, rusted, broken objects pulled from the water and muck of these new, fictional shorelines.
In Solution explores ideas of how we attempt to understand or recover a past we no longer have access to. A feeling of things falling apart. Of being in suspension. Of meaning being divorced and redefined once all context is lost.
We live in the aftermath of one disaster while a new disaster unfolds around us. But which disaster is which in this layered cake of heat, water, drought, disease, uprising, misinformation, disinterest, and disconnection?
In addition to In Solution, several pieces of Toscano’s previous large drawing work, A Meeting of Our Parallels have been reassembled for this exhibition. The 15-foot-long piece was originally shown at the independent Salt Lake City gallery God Hates Robots, and viewers were invited to purchase slices of the work by the linear inch. Each cut was determined by the patron, creating an interactive work where the audience participated in the work’s “destruction,” while at the same time creating more than a dozen shards that are forever linked in this unique community.
Artist Bio:
Mary Toscano draws, prints, sews, sometimes writes, and has been known to eat the whole apple.