Megan Mosholder: Pushing the Boundaries of Painting
“It’s hard to sell site-specific, temporary installations,”
says Megan Mosholder who just finished up a residency at VCCA. “So, I’m looking
for ways to articulate my three-dimensional ideas two dimensionally as a way to
sustain my practice.”
When referring to these works, she calls them paintings, but
they retain a strong sculptural quality. To make them, Megan takes a stretcher
frame and secures lengths of brightly colored nylon string to eyes screwed at
intervals into the stretcher bars. With its undulating lines of colored string,
the piece now resembles a reductive, flattened version of her large-scale
sculptural work. But this resemblance changes when she covers it with a piece of
white silk.
The silk has different levels of transparency, in some works
you can see the individual lines of string, in others, the silk blurs the
string creating a kind of colored shadow or aura. Megan’s trying to figure out
if the string should be recognizable or not; it’s certainly a labor intensive
way of achieving an effect, but it’s what she does and she believes that people
who know her work will understand what’s going on. The fact that you can see
the frame through the silk appeals to her; she intentionally exposes her
materials so there’s no mystery as to what she’s using to build paintings and installations.”
Putting the finishing touches on the work, Megan adds paint
and glitter to the surface. “I use a lot of light in my work and glitter is a
way of capturing light,” she explains.
She sees this work as a comment on the state of painting
today. “Both my degrees are in painting. There’s that constant talk about
painting being dead,” she says. “This has been going on for over a hundred
years — ever since photography came out. But it forces painters to find ways to
stretch and push boundaries. I like the idea that a painter can do whatever a
painter wants and still call it painting.” For her, this means using the
traditional structure, but without a traditional surface. “What’s happening in
this space with no canvas — I think that’s an interesting conversation.”
Megan credits Terasita Fernandez with whom she interned in
Brooklyn, with pushing her in the direction of installation. She also urged
Megan to become involved in residencies. Megan ended up spending five months
straight doing just that, followed by a year living with her parents to regroup
financially.
Thereafter, Megan moved to Atlanta where she feels embraced
by the arts community. She cites in particular, Michael Rooks, the Wieland
Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the High Museum who has
been very supportive of her, even nominating her as a Georgia Woman to Watch candidate
for the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Megan’s residency experience continues: she was recently
accepted into Atlanta’s long-term residency program: The Creatives
Project, which provides both studio space and housing.
At the behest of her fellow VCCA Fellows, Megan installed a
light sculpture, Ode to James Turrell (pictured. NB: this is not one of her paintings.) in
the skylight of VA6. The piece includes black lights and the optimum viewing
time is after dark when the UV sensitive string glows. It’s a wonderful
souvenir left behind at VCCA by this very interesting artist.
http://meganmosholder.com/
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