Mary Laube
marylaube.com
marylaube.com
The Attendant, Acrylic on panel, 12" x 12", 2019
Headrest, Acrylic on panel, 12" x 14", 2019
Motherland
My paintings address the relationship between material culture and memory. I use Korean imagery to represent memory within the context of personal and political narratives of my homeland. Memory is paradoxical because it signifies absence while generating new meaning. This is fueled by my interest in individual and collective narratives of cultural displacement, memory loss, diasporic identity, and the ubiquitous absence of ancestral knowledge. In the thick of globalization, I am prompted by my own identity as a Korean-born American to create representations of my own fractured and elusive sense of home. My work represents loss not only as the distancing from an absent object, but also as a creative force that can forge new content. The stories preserved within memorial objects are not only vestiges of the past, but reservoirs that can reflect the present in critical and pressing ways. Each painting references a unique object observed from various sources including museum collections and printed books relating to the history and culture of Korea. Tables, boxes, braids of hair, and textiles are treated as portraits: vessels for the inscription of memory or surrogates for absent bodies. While physically inert, they possess an animated quality: performing as standins for the human figure. Over time, the recognizable references in the work become abstracted, representing the spaces in our memory where we imagine or invent something new.
My paintings address the relationship between material culture and memory. I use Korean imagery to represent memory within the context of personal and political narratives of my homeland. Memory is paradoxical because it signifies absence while generating new meaning. This is fueled by my interest in individual and collective narratives of cultural displacement, memory loss, diasporic identity, and the ubiquitous absence of ancestral knowledge. In the thick of globalization, I am prompted by my own identity as a Korean-born American to create representations of my own fractured and elusive sense of home. My work represents loss not only as the distancing from an absent object, but also as a creative force that can forge new content. The stories preserved within memorial objects are not only vestiges of the past, but reservoirs that can reflect the present in critical and pressing ways. Each painting references a unique object observed from various sources including museum collections and printed books relating to the history and culture of Korea. Tables, boxes, braids of hair, and textiles are treated as portraits: vessels for the inscription of memory or surrogates for absent bodies. While physically inert, they possess an animated quality: performing as standins for the human figure. Over time, the recognizable references in the work become abstracted, representing the spaces in our memory where we imagine or invent something new.