The marrow in the bone, the crystal in the stone, the bullseye of her work is that she is an excellent landscape painter; that’s the bottom line about Washington–based painter, Mary Iverson. What separates her work from the norm, what makes it contemporary art instead of just an outstanding render, is her exacting and pointed commentary on the eminent disaster of our gross consumerist culture.
“I am intentionally squaring off with the existential issues of our time,” says Iverson. “In following my interests and working to resolve an artistic dichotomy within myself, between my love of nature and my fascination with the shipping industry, I came upon a visual solution that metaphorically echoes what we are facing in the world today.”
Iverson’s work, especially when a viewer first comes to it, has that instant–impact thing. It has the “that’s–so–bad–ass” quality, as I like to call it (actually that’s the first time I ever called it that, but I do like it). Anyways, upon deeper more reflective inspection, that surface “bad–assness” is backed by some pretty haunting content. Content that aims to dissect environmental taxation, population expansion, global gluttony, rampant capitalism; a lot of deep, important and even scary issues. Her work is not just an aesthetic success and deliberately confronts these global issues in her work.
“I’ve found a way to combine the landscape with the geometry, and this combination got to the heart of the matter that I was searching for all along: A reconciliation of the two sides of visual reality, the organic and the geometric, expressing the clash of the two aspects of our world, nature vs. human industry.”
It’s an honor to have Mary Iverson in our upcoming tenth printed issue out March 11th. You can pre order the new issue here.