Mary Laube’s paintings address the relationship between material culture and memory using Korean imagery to represent memory within the context of personal and political narratives. She is interested in individual and collective narratives of cultural displacement, memory loss, diasporic identity, and the ubiquitous absence of ancestral knowledge. The objects represented in her paintings come from various sources including museum collections, personal artifacts, and other items related to the broader act of memorialization. Tables, boxes, braids of hair, and textiles are treated as portraits - vessels for the inscription of memory or surrogates for absent bodies. While physically inert, they possess an animated quality: performing as stand-ins for the human figure. Overtime, the recognizable forms become abstracted, representing the spaces in our memory where we imagine or invent something new.
Painting is a dynamic art form that sustains difference. Laube’s paintings appear flattened yet physically retain a tactile and layered surface. Compositionally, her work relies on the edge of the painting to both conceal information and to suggest the expansion of the paintings’ visible subjects. The representation of multiple perspectives within a static medium implies the concurrent reality of different viewing points. The compatibility of difference within the pictorial logic of painting parallels memory’s paradoxes: it signifies absence while generating new meaning. While memory points to the past, it is continually modified in the present as it collides with additional experiences and systemic forces. Her work represents loss not only as the distancing from an absent object, but also as a creative force that can forge new content. The stories preserved within memorial artifacts are not only vestiges of the past, but reservoirs that reflect the present in critical and pressing ways.
Mary Laube was born in Seoul, South Korea. She received an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from the University of Iowa and a B.F.A. from Illinois State University. Recent exhibitions include the Spring Break Art Show (NYC), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (NYC), and Monaco (St. Louis). Her work has been supported by several artist residencies including Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Stiwdeo Maelor (Wales), and the Fanoon Center for Print media Research in Doha, Qatar. She is the recent recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award and an AHL Foundation Visual Art Award. She is also a co-founder of the Warp Whistle Project, a collaborative duo with composer Paul Schuette. Together, they make work that merges kinetic stage sets with music performance. Their latest work was performed with the Network for New Music in Philadelphia. Mary is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville in Painting and Drawing.