SpringSprung

MARQUEE PROJECTS is pleased to present SpringSprung, a group exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Michelle Benoit, Ryan Crotty, Terry Hoff, and Courtney Puckett.

Due to current circumstances and concerns about social distancing, we will not be hosting an opening reception for this exhibition. We will receive visitors by appointment only. While we are temporarily closed, we invite you to visit and explore our exhibition online. Marquee Projects website and Artsy site will post photos of the work and you can contact us to request a price list. Please also visit us on our social media platforms on Facebook and Instagram.

As an added feature, we will be periodically changing our front window display, rotating various pieces from the show for public viewing throughout the duration of the exhibit. Please stop by at your leisure.

We celebrate our fourth season and the Spring Equinox with an exhibition filled with hope, humor, renewal, and an explosion of vibrant colors – all of which we need – a little remedy for the wintertime red, white, and blues. The artists selected for SpringSprung employ various materials, techniques, and methods of application; but all share an affinity for formal abstraction and a shameless delight in the glory of color.  

All the artists hail from small towns across America – West Warwick, Rhode Island (Michelle Benoit); Auburn, Nebraska (Ryan Crotty); Pillar Point, California (Terry Hoff); and Holmes, New York (Courtney Puckett) – an indication that in this digital age great art is being made and shown outside concentrated urban areas. It’s a reminder, in times like these, that we are not merely made up of Red States and Blue States. We are a kaleidoscope of magenta, saffron, lapis lazuli, emerald, and tangerine.

Courtney Puckett’s work is made from household objects, material scraps, and castoffs. Committed to ecological concerns, she chooses to find rather than buy materials. Like a proper 21st century hunter-gatherer, she seeks out materials and saves whatever comes her way, deconstructing these domestic discards (including old furniture, household goods, and textiles) into human-sized abstract assemblages. Soft materials disguise rigid armatures of found objects, like skin on a skeleton. There is evidence of stitching and wrapping, and although her work is grounded in craft it is not bound by it. The constructions are at once totemic and statuesque, with titles that imply specific functionalities and/or social/occupational roles.

Terry Hoff very simply states, “Accumulate, organize, edit and deconstruct, then start the process again. The sheer enjoyment of searching for and being open to strange beauty is the foundation of what I do as an artist. The subconscious mind with all of its lexicon and image banks, Saturday morning cartoon, Disney classics, Tex Avery to Spongebob, and commercial art from the 1950s and ’60s are all some of the things that inhabit my paintings. My process is more like doodling on Pee-Chee Folders, combined with a collage of handmade decals, made of paint or paper and sometimes covered in epoxy resins. These piles, this layering relates to my elaborate dense installations work of years prior. In this playpen of paint and what it can do, I discover things that are oddly new yet familiar, reinforcing the peculiar and interesting experience of being human.”

Michelle Benoit renders compositions that apply a sculptural process to create painting-like objects. Mostly recycled and reclaimed materials — such as wood, Lucite, paints, and mixed media — are cut, assembled, stacked, adhered, re-cut, and then applied to a flat surface. Coalescing into strata of transparency, the pieces reveal both the process of their creation and their optical depth, and generate continually shifting interactions with surrounding light.

Ryan Crotty creates non-representational color field paintings rooted in the intensive squeegee tradition of silkscreen printmaking. Applying layers of translucent paint, he reveals evidence of the wooden stretcher frame that forms the skeleton of the painting, and highlights the imperfections and materiality of the canvas itself. Layers of this paint produce an interplay of light and color that suggest multidimensionality within a two-dimensional surface, and other unconventional painting techniques extend the surface of each piece beyond the edges of the canvas.