Still Painting

Maureen Nollette currently lives and works in Michigan (USA). Nollette’s work investigates unjust social constructs in a broad sense. The artist’s work has been included in exhibitions across the United States and China. In addition, her work is collected by prominent private and public collections including Detroit Institute of the Arts (Detroit, MI); Yves St. Laurent (New York, NY); MGM Mirage Hotel (Las Vegas, NV); j. jill Group (Tilton, NH); and Gerald R. Ford International Airport (Grand Rapids, MI). Nollette’s practice employs mundane objects to create drawings, paintings, and relief sculptures. She explores this arena by engaging in labor-intensive tracing, stitching, pinning, and painting; sometimes massing seemingly frivolous materials for careful and intimate consideration. The grid, a precise and consistent armature representing societal infrastructure, contrasts the imperfection of Nollette’s slow, deliberate, rhythmic methods. The traced forms from flattened cardboard boxes saved after the important contents they housed are gone signify a support system for items worthy of protection or containment, asking where society places value. This critique via pattern, shape, color, and scale rejects the temptation to support our idea of what may be labeled merely ornamentation. Abstracted references to topography, textiles, and tiling assume key signifiers of underpinning labor, work frequently executed by overlooked and undervalued individuals. Nollette hopes to reveal our biased social infrastructure, permitting change.