MARCI SPIER’S ARTIST STATEMENT

“I started painting about 7 years ago in my backyard. I would feverishly paint and store the paintings, hundreds or paintings, in my garage – never really knowing what to do with these cathartic splatters. I never named them or thought about them again once they felt complete. It wasn’t until a few years later that I recognized how painting could be autobiographical. I wanted to understand what I was doing, why I was doing it and how my work may fit into a larger conversation. 

After some pretty big shifts in life including a cross country move from California to Maine. I decided to apply to graduate schools. My undergraduate degree in English and French  literature was from a small liberal arts school in Michigan. I had no formal training in art, let alone painting but I applied anyway and in January 2019 graduated with my MFA from Lesley Art and Design in Cambridge, MA. I had some incredible mentors, Keltie Ferris, Jackie Saccoccio and Elisabeth Condon. Each adding their own influence to my diligent practice of not only painting but understanding contemporary art and its place in society. 

My work became less autobiographical, more thoughtful, slower and deliberate. Straying away from swift stokes common to abstract expressionism and more focused on repetition and strings of focus. I’m drawn to blue and aim to capture something that is lost if ever put into words. My path hasn’t been linear or predictable and my work imitates that concept. My approach signals a shift that I recognize in myself and one I see going on in our society to different ways of interpreting ideas. I see a new model to approach categorizing for understanding that includes defiance of white, hetero-normative, western standards. I use the grid, symbolic of those standards for and against itself to demonstrate this non-linear approach to time and identity. My paintings hope to express a lack of political subversion by creating grids that are wobbly and missing parts. The negative space constructs a new grid like space that dismisses category as a valid identifier and rejects the structure of the grid as stable and reliable.”