Mary Mocas

Region: Pacific Coast

Website: http://marymocas.com

City / State: Los Altos Hills, CA

 I am a mixed-media artist who utilizes collage, painting, and sculpture. My process begins when I gather peeling wheat-pasted paper from urban walls around the world. I accumulate layers of torn narrations while adding hard-edge, poured, sprayed, and gesturally applied paint to various substrates. Found objects such as broken glass, dislocated road reflectors, surgical detritus, wire, beads, and wood also make their way into the work.

The resulting compositions explore surface and structure, representation and abstraction, and play with positive and negative space. Large paint pours become individual pieces that are hung by metal brackets and chains. These works become much more referential to the human body. Importantly, they reveal both sides of a painterly surface and utilize light as an agent of change. My work offers an alternative entry point and exchange––one that is based on feminist concerns and free-floating anxiety regarding mainstream social structures. Weaving signs and signifiers related to control, subjugation, liberation and revolution, my work is about reimagining and about offering space for contemplation of individual and shared identities.