Madelon Powers Gallery to Present X-Scapes – Deconstructing the Urban and Pastoral Landscapes

Posted by: Elizabeth Richardson on January 13, 2017, No Comments

Susan Molina Washington and Stephen Washington, two artists who explore abstract expressionism and bring their own process and sensibilities to the theme of landscapes, will be featured in the exhibit, X-Scapes – Deconstructing the Urban and Pastoral Landscapes, February 1 to March 10 at East Stroudsburg University’s Madelon Powers Gallery.

Hours for the gallery, located in the university’s Fine & Performing Arts Center, Normal and Marguerite streets, are 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Friday.

A reception for the artists will be held Thursday, February 2 from 6-8 p.m. in the gallery. Both the exhibit and reception are open to the public at no cost.

Born in England, Stephen Washington attended Southport College of Art and Hull College of Art. He was a commercial artist and fine art photographer until relocating to the U.S. in 2001. Washington began to explore traditional landscape painting as an origin for a body of work connecting his interest in the relevance of painting as a medium in the 21st century and his concern for the landscape itself as it is changed by industrial agriculture, development, climate change and natural disasters.

Beginning with plein air studies, Washington deconstructs the pastoral landscape by gradually removing representational color, detail and perspective until the scene becomes a motif for expressive brushwork and the landscape becomes the medium itself. The paintings in the show represent the beginning of a series entitled “Sambara – Final Harvest,” and are intended to convey the progression of the artist’s creative process and his search for a vocabulary of mark making and composition.

Susan Molina Washington learned origami and sumi ink drawing from her Japanese godmother as a child and spent her teens deconstructing dressmaking as a punk fashionista. She worked in the New York City fashion industry for 15 years. Her paintings reflect her history with tailoring, pattern pieces and threads, as these objects form the lines and edges within her works which explore the relationships among painterly mark-making and graphic elements within a collage surface.

The paintings reference the urban landscape of Molina Washington’s childhood and youth in Brooklyn and Manhattan and deconstructs the elements of the landscape, where the viewer at once observes multiple sides of an object or reads the compositions as aerial views of the urban landscape.

For more information on the exhibit or reception, contact the Fine and Performing Arts Events Line at esuarts@esu.edu or call 570-422-3483.