This coming Friday (5/25) is the next Troy Night Out, and Terra Nova Gallery will feature new work by local artists Kristan Hodorowski, Jen Mahar, and Emily Armstrong.

[Read below, as artist Jennifer Mahar describes her art and the inspiration behind it.]

For the past few years my paintings have been getting smaller and less peopled. After years of focusing on various kinds of portraiture, my focus had shifted to very disparate sorts of landscapes.  When I moved from the from an urban area to a fairly rural one, the change of scenery was a kind of emotional jolt.  I love modern corporate architecture; its futuristic, clean, manicured world conjures a kind of blissful peace for me.  I missed being around it, but the lush green of my new world was intoxicating.  I embarked on a series of paintings that celebrated and explored these two environments;  streetlights and windmills, glass and steel buildings and rolling farmland.  Because landscape painting was unfamiliar territory, I started small — and loved it.  The tiny canvases made the impressionistic, almost abstracted way that I wanted to show these images very immediate.  Also, in my work curating art shows for coffee shops, I had come to appreciate small art for its accessibility to the average person in terms of cost and purchasability.
“A separate project that has been evolving over the past year springs from my interest in Hello Kitty and other cute/Japanese-esque imagery.  I find it irresistible, but vaguely disturbing.  My response, a series of drawings and sculptures entitled “Burden,” depict abstract, babyish animals whose heads are too big for them to hold up.  People are sometimes attracted to impractical, even debilitating traits or behaviors (oversized heads in infants, high heels on women.)  This group of work is sort of about that issue, but really it’s just fun to draw and sculpt cute animals.”

Jennifer Maher received her Bachelors in Art and English Writing at Knox College and her MFA at SUNY Albany.  She is a ceramic tile artisan with L’esperance Tileworks, a house and breakbeat dj, and Art Coordinator for Uncommon Grounds Coffee Shops.