Beyond the mauve zone

MaryKate Maher

on view through October 7, 2023

New York, NY - FORMah Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by artist MaryKate Maher, Beyond the Mauve Zone. MaryKate Maher’s collages and sculptures shift between themes of energy and voids, forms and nature, and bodies and space. The exhibition’s title is from an occultist book by Kenneth Grant, where the realm of the Self was known as "the Mauve Zone.” This zone can only be reached while in a state of deep sleep, where people discover the reality of consciousness is formless and thus presented as a void. Beyond the Mauve Zone will be on view from September 5 - October 7, 2023 with a collector’s opening reception on Saturday, September 9 between 6-7 pm followed by open doors 7-9pm.

These works are process-based, and painting, sculpture, and photography are all involved in the works though not necessarily apparent. Maher innovatively uses a variety of photo papers from luster to matte in the collage works, while the sculptures incorporate UV prints on aluminum or dibond, hydrocals, and resin. The show has different varieties of vessels and reliquaries, investigating hollow and enclosed spaces, empty and bodily, obscure landscapes, and soft architecture, ethereal and firm. They grow volumes and flatten out through color, line, light, and shadow, oscillating between shallow planes and depth. Although rooted in their materiality, there is an apparent search for the sacred in these simultaneously prehistoric and futuristic works.

The exploration of these ideas done in Maher’s recognizable visual language brings to mind many references, one of which is Ma, the Japanese concept of a pause in time, an interval or emptiness in space. Her connection to this search of self in the depths of sleep and attempt to recreate it for us harkens to the line from poet Joy Harjo, “I am witness to flexible eternity.” Maher takes the mauve zone out of the small self and more into what author Ralph Waldo Emerson called “the soul of the whole'' or what author Sophie Strand calls “the animate everything.” These are vessels and reliquaries built to hold space for the sacred nothing.

Recently, it was discovered that spiders possess an extraordinary consciousness, including minds extending beyond their bodies. The silk threads they spin out behind them are so crucial to their cognitive abilities that some scientists believe it should be considered part of their mind. This body of work investigates a place of meditative insight and dives into the blurry question, where does one person/place/thing stop and another begin? Part dream world, the works are fantastical voids within fantastical voids, the same way Ma is the time and space life needs to breathe, feel, and connect. These voids are not empty, and these works are structures holding the primordial space for growth to begin.

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