Georgia Marsh currently lives and works in New York. Her work is found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Musee Nationale d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; and the Cleveland Art Museum, Cleveland, OH, among others and has been included in recent years in group exhibitions at the RISD Museum of Art, Providence, RI; the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; and the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT.
In a moment of digital dominance it is important to be reminded that a painting is a thing, an embodied, physical object, the experience of which is formed by its material attributes.
The current Arc Paintings consist of images of plant forms and large color shapes, painted in oil on a matte polyester film called Duralar — a coolly mechanical white surface suggestive of the screen of a digital device. This material is mounted to a translucent Lexan support which floats an inch away from the wall, allowing light to pass through and bounce back from the surface behind.
These paintings are abstract, not in the sense of a tension between representation and abstraction but in the sense of an idea that moves away from content and fixedness of meaning.
If white can be said to contain all colors, then flowers, as signifiers, contain every signified. It is not that flowers are meaningless— real flowers and plants, of course, are indifferent to interpretation— it is that painted flowers, depictions of flowers, are so overburdened and overlain with meanings and significance that they become, across all cultures and across the arc of all cultural histories, a repository for all possible meanings. They overflow.