April Ford and Carlaina Brown: Swirl, Chop, Build

April Ford: The plastic objects she picks up in the street once allured the consumer, conveying a message of satisfying desires and needs. Now they have become despised. She returns them to a new state of beauty or intrigue, while subverting their original message and inviting contemplation of late-stage consumerism. She integrate images of body parts into the work to bring up questions about how we live our lives. How do these fast-n-easy plastics create us, our bodies and lives?

She love the challenge of integrating stubbornly ugly objects such as clear plastic one-use Starbucks cups into her work. She is interested both in transforming these materials and in having them retain their useless reviled identity. She wants the work to be both a document of who we are now and an inspiration toward transformation “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible” (Charles Eisenstein). She hopes the viewer will feel for these discarded materials, the natural world, and ourselves.

Carlaina Brown: Do you ever get lost in your thoughts and let the world around you blur? How about focusing on your nose and moving your attention out from there, inch by inch until you can see no further. Then flatten that space into two dimensions. Don’t think about the objects and their names, just imagine their colors and shapes.

These works blur shapes and colors into compact compositions where the eye is free to wander in and out, and around again. Her own experience of the work is layer upon layer. As the layers build, aspects of them are lost and new information replaces the old. The final painting is a collage of these many layers, each layer a cross section compressed into the flat surface of the painting. Her process is intuitive and informed by her environment, the materials at hand, and the intermingling of those two factors. The finished work invites an emotive response that is unique to each viewer.