Marci Spier

Artist Statement

“In 2014, in order to make life more bearable, I began to paint. It was the summer of 2015 when I pitched a tent on Congress Street in Portland, Maine and sold my first painting at the Portland Sidewalk Art Festival. The validation and acceptance I received that summer fueled an unexpected journey into Maine’s art community. The reverence I felt for Maine’s roster of artist drove me straight to higher education in order to relate and create with better understanding. I earned my MFA from Lesley Art and Design in January 2019 and continued to show my work throughout Maine – The Francis Hotel, Frank Brockman Gallery in Brunswick, the Harlow in Hallowell and Ocean House Gallery in Cape Elizabeth.

Undeniably influenced by the rocky coast, magical light, and the autonomous air Maine offers – my work grew less autobiographical, more thoughtful, slower and deliberate. I became centered 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 artistic 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 for categorizing 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 vision 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.”