Mary Block

Thematically, my work explores the unique anomalies and humor found in contemporary midwestern America. This can be a harsh landscape. Awe of its beauty accompanies an understanding of its underlying disquiet. It’s the same with the human inhabitants. We are generous, prickly, odd, and well aware of our place in nature. My neighbors are less interested in overt protest and more interested in survival. We know that we live in a place of beauty, wealth and want.

Since 2019 my work has focused on using the combination of the two media to create “Dialogues” between form and image. Each form and image in a Dialogue, must be elegant, important, mobile, and detachable. Parts cannot be stored, as such, as the work, as a whole, is “living” by constantly evolving.

Each Dialogue is an emotional and spatial construct that provides approximations applied to a larger problem of change in landscape and space. Any element within a piece may be purchased. As individual artifacts, each may move into the personalized space of an individual’s life. Each work presented on the Illinois Artist Listing site represents individual pieces in more than one dialogue. Each will be replaced in a future Dialogue by yet another form or image. A Dialogue is an artwork that is constantly changing.

Archival work, e.g. “Justice” explores melding two art forms, sculpture and architecture, within a prescribed larger venue.  I am  fascinated by the bones of forms and images which maintain their unique characteristics while being subject to temporal and population changes.  Here is the very beginning of the heart of the Dialogues which are purposely living rather than static pieces of work.