Aurea Nova 2023-24
Aurea Nova, curated by Judith Mullen
Riverside Art Center 2023
Finding and unlocking shapes and ideas from her unconscious mind, Michelle Wasson continues to push the boundaries of making space in the two-dimensional realm. In Wasson’s latest body of work, born from her form of psychic automatism, gone are obvious painterly strategies—evidence of striving and trickery—to fool the viewer's eye and heart into pictorial engagement. Instead, we as audience, are gifted layered paintings such as “Chimera,” oil on canvas, rendered out of a sense of love, gratitude, and a seamless flow of energy and ultimately, an intimate relationship with shadow; generously woven together with qualities and experiences found in our own humanness and in the natural world.
All of Wasson’s paintings are tenderly painted in oil on canvas where recognizable and unrecognizable forms converge into a mysterious new reality in which we find ourselves transported for a rest, a wander, or an enlightened repose. Quoting a section of Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, Breton stated “I believe in the future of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.”
- Judith Mullen