Maria Stabio (b. San Francisco, CA) is a first generation Filipino-American interdisciplinary artist working in painting and social practice.
She graduated with a BFA in Painting from Boston University and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University.
Her work has recently been shown at Pen and Brush (NY), Chasama (NY), Essex Flowers (NY), (harbor) (NY), Orgy Park (NY) and Ely Center of Contemporary Art (CT)
She has been awarded artist residencies at the Hinge Arts Program (MN), The Rensing Center (SC), and Vermont Studio Center (VT).
In late 2015, she began 2MF with fellow artist Sonya Derman. 2MF is series of community meetings – open and participatory experiences - hosted by a selected guest artist. 2MF has been mentioned in Artnews, Observer NY, Art in America, and Art F City.
Also in 2015, she purchased and renovated the Grier City Schoolhouse, an historic four-room schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania. She uses the property as her primary residence and studio and rents out a guest room on Airbnb.
In 2012, she was a recipient of the Artist in Residence Fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatarwhere she served as artist in residence and adjunct faculty for one academic year. She taught drawing, painting, and a special topics course called Contemporary Painting Practices to undergraduate students pursuing their BFA at VCUQ. During this period, her second one-person exhibition, Carthage Site opened at Katara Art Center in Doha. Carthage Site was a site specific installation of paintings and prints responding to ancient Islamic art in the wake of contemporary forces.
She also works part-time at Alexandre Gallery in New York City.
Statement
Largely putting aside the brush, my recent paintings prove somewhat interdisciplinary. The pieces—narrative compositions depicting fragmented images extracted from everyday experience (e.g. a light bulb, leaf, spider, or shower head)—are crafted from sprayed planes of color-block acrylic, layered on top of ad hoc stencils (for example, a leaf or q-tip); the images themselves emerge from overlapping screens of pigment, a confusion of positive and negative space. This additive, flat, layer-oriented process then not only recalls printmaking (despite the work’s irreproducibility) but also the collection’s play and commentary on light speaks to the mechanics of stained glass as well as the attentions of Pointillism.
But the substance of the work exists outside and alongside my interest in the material—form, color, process. My making proves inextricable from a more explicit “content” I seek to communicate, visually.
I began taking trips the Philippines with my mom to visit her family a couple years ago. It was an adjustment. But not only because of the emotional complications of getting to know distant family. I found myself baffled by things one might consider more basic—the little things: I was staying with my uncle. The light in the guest bedroom kept flickering, thwarting sleep; thanks to an electrical glitch. The shower, much like a garden shower, was handheld. A ventilation system was nowhere to be seen. The foods we ate were different. Everyone had a ceiling fan. Nothing was better or worse than my predictable life in America, just slightly divergent, almost uncanny.
The images these pieces depict (e.g. the spider, the shower, the ceiling fan), the stories they tell, are then pulled from the unfamiliar, new environment that also happens to be a heritage. The works’ rhythm and pulse then resides in the vitality of finding myself outside of myself, in a place that was supposedly mine but seemed someone else’s.
But the images and narratives don’t simply speak to identity through an engagement with heritage. The images oscillate between signifying a particularity (e.g. a particular lightbulb) and denoting motif (i.e. “lightbulb”, a shape, a placeholder). The body parts themselves are modeled off of my own body, yet appear generic, reduced and abstracted. Two transitions appear: first—the transmission of experience into memory, and second—the transformation of this remembered experience into its new material life via notation (a personal, yet learned and coherent, visual language).
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