Mary Lou Zelazny

I have been making paintings with collage for the past 20 years. The spontaneity of collage combined with the rigors of painting and drawing create multiple meanings whose sorting and unraveling drives the content. My subjects are improvisations and it is here where my humor, discomfort, incomprehension, and pleasure can coexist. This indirect method appeals to me because of the unpredictability and technical demands that it presents. The fusion of photographic images and paint generates tensions within the vocabulary of picture making which in turn becomes a further source of motivation and inspiration. Art history's endless examples of visual translation offer me a rich encyclopedia of visual forms upon which I improvise and reflect.

I have divided the images into distinct subject headings in order to organize different bodies of work dating back to the early 1980's. You will see recurrent themes or motifs that I have revisited over the years, reexamined from new perspectives or modified by different technical applications.

boats

Here boats as vehicles are held up to a wary scrutiny. They are naïve contraptions of questionable seaworthiness; a sodden flotsam of sculptural bric-a-brac and metaphors. Mechanical devices like these should inspire some suspicion and mystery; they contain a bit of my own trepidation at being cast into water. These works on paper are available as archival inkjet prints.