CHASM: INTUTION, RISK AND CERTAINTY
Three Artists Reflect: Helen Frederick, Madalyn Marcus, and Randi Reiss-McCormack Longwood Center for Visual Arts, Longwood University, Farmville, VA (https://lcva.ongwood.edu) September 12, 2025 to February 1, 2026
Exhibition Overview:
Free from the usual tropes of Western art we three artists work intuitively into the unknown. Our works are that of bodily experience, beyond language and trusting the intuitive. The nature of the experiential is explored in multi-dimensional pathways that lead from personal visual language to shared human conditions.
The alignment of our work, Frederick, Marcus and Reiss-McCormack, comes from studio practices where the physical act of creating, and the insistence unpredictability of chosen materials guide the next step without expecting a determined outcome. The love of sketchbooks as a sounding board, paper as a fundamental substrate, tension and containment at the edges, and expansiveness through layering and exploring multiple images in a series or sequences are mutual affinities. Melancholy or a slipping away of time emerge as common themes, but they are subdued by the beauty of materiality, to instill a sense of immediate presence. In these works, one can experience an understanding of the working and the handling of materials to follow a transformative path.
Causation and effect are implied by the task of following risk or certainty in the making of the work. Frederick follows a system to build up a wall of images of a deliberate size and natural or infused color. That certainty of a system belies the fact that the depth of surface might be breached by how much image the paper substrate can load. Sometimes her abstract forms take on a more personal gaze that is conditioned by her outlook on life and her attraction to environmental and social injustice. Marcus uses various amounts of pressure with her materials on paper and canvas to awaken a sensuous experience driven by color and kineticism. Her own thoughts and unconscious associations determine the painting’s structure. Her risk is when to stop and be comfortable with the life within the image. Reiss-McCormack trusts intuitive play within the exploration of complex entanglements with a rich palette of experimental colors and raised surfaces. From chaotic to control she guides both certainty and risk in her works. “These suspended papers act as a language of silence to sit opposite times of violence, as it is truly a major overwhelming paradox we are living. We float in paradoxical/transitional interludes.” Helen Frederick
