Annabeth Marks and Hugh Zeigler exhibit recent works on paper and canvas. The painters are contemporaries and graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design, and have spent the past few years together in studio, dialogue, and critique. From these formative experiences, their work has developed respectively into unique, mature bodies of work, yet there is strong resonance between the abstract works of the two artists. This school of thought they are advancing takes formal play, material invention, imagery, and tactility to places where abstraction cannot remain neutral or just image. There are nods to process, means, and material that reflect the actions of the artist at equal measure with painted content. Object and image coalesce in materiality and content . Visceral and cerebral meet where the artist's hand lingers in paint to reveal logic between intention and incident. Annabeth enters psychological territory with paint so thick and viscous that it breaks the picture plane, to beg a gut reaction, a sensation of touch and smell not always pleasant or lofty. Hugh's paintings are somehow warped or broken, and though they maintain traces of structure or method, coherence is ambivalent as is success or failure. Marks and Zeigler address taste, beauty, and the conventions of painting to push a project that is demonstrative in means and questioning in its ends.

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Hugh Zeigler on His Work

These paintings demonstrate processes where I hamstring the composing, contemplative functions of making a painting. Self-imposed, adverse conditions make translation of an idea or drawing onto canvas difficult or futile. You might notice areas of efficacy alongside garbled, wrecked passages. I’ve enabled myself a practice in which deliberation is an assembly line operation of a preliminary phase, where I do not make a last crescendo mark, step back and…Fin! A good painting! I collude with gravity, volatile media, and fortune, and create conditions where thought, planning, and material incident may deliver a painting that satisfactorily hangs or not. Artist and viewer together weigh the work. Aesthetics, taste, meaning, and virtuosity converge in a constellation synthesized around the conventions of painting.

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Annabeth Marks on Her Work

I see painting as an exercise in excavating imagery and form out of an abstract language. For me it is a means of digesting and understanding subjective ideas of beauty and the grotesque through allowing the quality of paint to move between being luminous and pure, to thick, goupy and disgusting. It is a means of playing with established ideas of taste and what is, or is thought to be, pleasurable. I find that laboring over these paintings, i.e. covering up and scraping away over and over, is a means for grounding them. In a puritanical sense, the labor at times helps to ease the unease of making abstract paintings, and is also a way for me to sift through the arbitrary until it solidifies into logic.