Natural Motif: Lorraine Gilbert and Natasha Mazurka

2013, Celina Jeffery, Border Crossings, Vol. 32, No. 4.  Special Venice Issue: Vol. 42, No. 2.

Abstract

Natasha Mazurka's finely lit, soft, art nouveau-resonant paint- ings are deeply nostalgic and seem to engage with a longing for natural histories of the past. Both organic and graphically patterned, they oscillate between painting and the graphic arts, as well as hand and mechanical reproduction. The tensions between materiality and the industrial in Mazurka's painting Arctic, 2012, also informed A Y Jackson's painting Arctic in Summer, 1961. Mazurka's subsequent abstracted sketches of Jackson's "whiplash" branches are displayed in a cabinet below this work in the permanent exhibition of the Firestone Collection, "In Focus: A Collector's History," while the resulting painting emanates luminously on the other side of the partitioned space, revealing the interlacing curatorial theme of the cultural constructs of nature that permeate the connecting exhibi- tions. Here, nature becomes a motif, whose highly stylized forms and glowing presence assumes something ethereal and other- worldly. Mazurka's interest in the 19th century's ordering of the natural world is echoed by [Lorraine Gilbert]'s longing to re-engage with and re-evaluate the original land- scape of the Group.