Maria Park’s paintings, installations, and public projects explore how technology shapes perception and affects how we engage with the world around us. Field Diagram traces the ways in which Park’s studio became a site for her to reestablish both a ground and a horizon after the loss of her partner and collaborator Branden Hookway in 2021. Upon returning to their shared studio in Ithaca in 2023 after three years away, Park spent six months rearranging the space so that it would reflect a conversation between her work, Hookway’s work, and their collaborative projects. She could only focus on her own studio practice after establishing this physical diagram.
Park’s mineral paintings—made through a painstaking process of reverse painting on clear acrylic—contain multiple levels of highly personal symbolism. Like Hansel and Gretel’s trail of breadcrumbs, Park collects and paints minerals to symbolically mark her family’s path through life. The exhibition presents the diagram as a shifting field, one where lines are continuously drawn and redrawn.
Maria Park
Fluorite, 2020
Acrylic reverse painted on plexiglass and mounted on EPS, 16½ x 17½ inches
Courtesy of the artist
Maria Park
Imprint 10, 2022
Acrylic and glitter reverse painted on plexiglass and mounted on EPS, 30 x 30 inches
Courtesy of the artist
Maria Park
Obsidian, 2019
Acrylic and glitter reverse painted on plexiglass and mounted on EPS, 19 x 20¼ inches
About the Artist:
Maria Park’s work examines ways that technology intervenes in our perception of and participation in the world. Ranging from serially based paintings to site-specific installations, interdisciplinary collaborations, and public projects, her work explores human presence and agency within a media-reliant society. Recent work has centered around the language of diagrams that operate as signs involving a ritual of recording and signaling while exploring the interplay between protocol, legibility and duration. Born in Munich, Germany, she grew up in the Bay Area and has lived in Ithaca, NY since 2006. She received an MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and is an associate professor in the Department of Art at Cornell University.
Maria Park: Field Diagram is part of the Everson CNY Artist Initiative, an exhibition program that celebrates the multi-faceted talents of regional artists. The CNY Artist Initiative is made possible with support from Terry and Bill Delavan.
The Everson is supported by the Dorothy and Marshall M. Reisman Foundation; the General Operating Support program, a regrant program of the County of Onondaga with the support of County Executive, J. Ryan McMahon II, and the Onondaga County Legislature, administered by CNY Arts; and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
