a non-profit gallery for the visual and performing arts

2833-A Hathaway Rd., Richmond, VA 23225
in the Stratford Hills Shopping Center

Gallery hours beginning Saturday, January 22, 2022:
Noon to 4pm, Tuesday - Sunday
Free and Open to the Public
Purchase artwork from our online store

Untitled 2020
Gouache and graphite on cardboard
16 x 12 cm
$145

Untitled 2020
Gouache and graphite on cardboard
22.5 x 16 cm
NFS

Reliquary Box IV 2020
Gouache and graphite on cardboard
27.5 x 17 x 7.5 cm
$1,700

Untitled 2020
Gouache and graphite on cardboard
13 x 20 cm
NFS

Reliquary Box V 2020
Gouache and graphite on cardboard
25 x 10 x 15 cm
$2,100

Artist Statement

My practice plays with a crisis of meaning in iconography. Looking to icons as found objects, dislocated from their time and place, I re-define them through cartooning to create new, intimate narratives. Rather than depicting biblical cycles, these narratives depict a psychological space through the recurring figure of the angel. These androgynous figures exist in a state of ambiguity and investigate abstracted artifacts of the past that are both mysterious and banal. In the tradition of icon painting, the saint is typically accompanied by objects and signifiers that are extensions of the figure. However, in my work, the artifact is always foreign to the figure, reflecting a psychological distance between memory and history. By subverting these relations, my work uses history as a loose armature for the framing of different moods and sensations.

My current body of work consists of painted sculptures that investigate how meaning can be created through architectural dispositions. Using archaic volumes, the sculptures introduce spatial configurations to 2-dimensional works. Here, drawings are affected by light and changing vantage points, relating across real space rather than illusionistic space.

Bio

Mae Dessauvage is a painter and architect living and working in New York, NY and Cambridge, MA. She received her B.A. from Columbia University and her M. Arch from The Harvard Graduate School of Design. Recent exhibitions include a three-person show entitled "Iconologies" at Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Philadelphia, PA) as well as solo shows at Gallery Madison Park (New York, NY) and BAAA Gallery (Cambridge, MA) entitled "Figures and Objects." She is currently an artist in residence at Trestle Art Space in Brooklyn, NY.