Good Heavens

In her first presentation with the gallery, Blade Study presents a solo show of new landscapes titled, Good Heavens, by Mariel Rolwing Montes. An idiom expressing surprise, frustration – when whispered, awe — "good heavens" describes a reaction. It implies exposure to the unfamiliar, strange, or sublime. Of her work Rolwing Montes writes, "I paint things I did and didn't see."

Rolwing Montes telescopes into her own sceneries, painting as an observer looking in. Rendered in cool tones, she paints the blurred rush of scenery from the passenger’s seat spliced with the evidence of developing and fading memories. An eerie quality permeates. Her compositions are unpeopled, and instead, carefully collected inanimate objects or “effigies” as Rolwing Montes calls them, stand in for living figures. The spaces Rolwing Montes renders are equally possible in reality as they are digitally. She depicts thresholds and loci of change in the form of grids, screens, and windows, further exaggerating the distance between registers. This rhythm of gridding and pixelization, resolution and distortion, is Rolwing Montes' solution for describing one fundamental structure of reality: the grid. Initially inspired by the construction of Peruvian textiles and her familial roots to the Andes, the artist began to notice the grid as a functional bridge between ancient technologies, like weavings and petroglyphs, to contemporary modalities, such as the ever-present screen. It becomes a place of connection, then, as the underlying structure of both our material and digital world.

In this body of work, Rolwing Montes tugs at nostalgia’s role in crafting memory. In the bulk of these paintings, she drafts a range of keepsakes, from sentimental to the banal, onto landscapes sourced from the artist’s digital and film photography. However, some are true to their source material. The exhibition as a whole plays with an uncanny blend of real and invented images, making use of doubling and triplicate of some materials to mimic the surreal timeline of a memory or a dream. For example, Yosemite Sam (an adorable, gunslinging Looney Tunes character who embodies an absurdist Western masculinity), appears in three paintings in variant, disorienting representations. Once as processed through the grid of an LED board, most vividly as a peeling sticker, and again in the flickering lights of a pedestrian crossing signal. In all three instances, he maintains a barrier between the viewer and the landscape itself. Seeking to create a sense of the unattainable, pulling at the thread of desire's relationship to lack, ultimately Rolwing Montes is asking how images construct reality, inform memory, and create narrative.

Rolwing Montes is a painter from Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons the New School for Design in 2017 and is currently an MFA graduate candidate The Hunter College MFA Program in Studio Art.