Towards is pleased to present Josh Meier and Madeline Peckenpaugh, a two-person exhibition of
recent paintings.
Working across painting, printmaking, and collage, the two artists investigate the possibilities
of transformation – and the ways in which memory, materiality and meaning are continually being made and remade throughout this process.
In discussing her work, Madeline Peckenpaugh has referred to her paintings as “psychological, abstracted landscapes, pulled from memory and the changes in my everyday environment…” Working intuitively, she builds up her compositions through thin layers of colour, before scraping them back, constructing a sort of gestural palimpsest, and revealing traces of what has come before. This exploration of pigment, surface, and mark-making is fundamental to Peckenpaugh’s practice. Hovering between representation and abstraction, her paintings seem to oscillate with energy. Bursts of tightly controlled, staccato like brushstrokes give way to larger, sweeping gestural marks that imbue a vitality and dynamism to the paintings.
Josh Meier’s practice is concerned with the ways in which memory, materiality and meaning intersect with one another. Utilizing a combination of painting, printmaking and collage, he creates intimate works that draw upon multiple sets of references, from literature and philosophy to art history and his own personal set of experiences. The resulting artworks are both materially and conceptually dense, with Meier constructing motifs and a distinct visual vocabulary of open-ended associations that he weaves across his practice. Through his work, he highlights the complex and often highly personal set of conditions in which meaning is made.
