- Maria Creyts
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Maria Creyts is an American artist whose production straddles disciplines of photography, design, assemblage, and installation art. Creyts, who earned her BFA at Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA from Yale University School of Art, signs her work with the alias mariaurora.
Contents
Exhibitions
Creyts’ work has been exhibited at the Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo in Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico (Bessie Mae/Béseme y otras, 2010), Lyons Wier Gallery in New York City (Autumn Art Preview, 2010), and Leedy-Voulkos Art Center in Kansas City, Missouri (neoPanos, 2011), among other venues.
Creative process
The artist begins her mural scale panorama format photo projects through constructing an assemblage of fabric that is then photographed in sections at high resolution. After the photos are joined with the help of design software, the wide image is printed and mounted on single or multiple panels or, alternatively, treated as a fine art wall paper and adhered directly to the wall. Many of Creyts' images are created so they can cycle across the width of a wall seamlessly.
Artist’s statement
“Textiles offer a ready palette of pattern and color and fashioning things in three dimensions has always been a part of what I do. The formal structural language for fabric is one I continue to acquaint myself with: corded shirring, shell hems and ruffles, darted and curve-cut flounces, smocked tucks, box pleats… I adapt standard methods to suit atypical uses. The mistress of a country cottage in Kent, England once gave me a catalog of roses. Thumbing through, I appreciated that many of the flowers pictured were the kind with one row of petals circling a central mass of fringy stamens. The design of the frieze raggedy rose is like this.[1] raggedy rose’s cluster of stamens was made with slashed tucks and the fringed wide wale corduroy and houndstooth check were washed and dried at the laundromat to make them look raggy. To better fit my long format, the rose face is wide and ovoid in a way that recalls the fabric face of Raggedy Ann. Broad ribbons of brilliant and toned-down greens were sewn face to face with one satin and one dull side out to approximate the varying color and sheen on the front and back of leaves. Loosely suggesting foliage, the sweeping doubled up ribbons add a quality of a crest owing to their symmetry. Sometimes I am asked what aspect of my work constitutes the original. While the photo project depicts a subject I create, I revise its composition in a variety of ways so that it becomes more complex than the assemblage. In this way both results of the process are unique, and the photo frieze is not a mere reproduction This appreciation for my production is supported by Baudrillard in his assertion that the simulacrum (likeness) is not a copy of the real, but a truth of its own.[2]” -- Maria Creyts[3]
Influences
To identify a kind of canon to which her work belongs, Creyts compares her photo friezes that stretch horizontally through an interior to the Bayeux Tapestry. She cites embroidery from Oaxaca State in Mexico and Yoruba adire from Nigeria as inspirations and looks to the paintings and drawings of Sir Stanley Spencer (see Hilda and I at Pond Street, 1954) as a model of infatuation with pattern and textiles in two dimensional composition. In terms of creating the subject for her photographic projects, her process can be likened to that of Shana and Robert ParkeHarrison [1].
References
- ^ see: http://mariaurora.net/artwork/1889018_raggedy_rose.html
- ^ paraphrased from Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Stanford, CA, 1988, pp. 143-7
- ^ from literature provided by the artist's studio
Publications
Self, Dana, “Panoramic Patterns,” Kansas City Star, April 21, 2011
Brisendine, Steve, "Layers of Newness: mariaurora (Maria Creyts)," ARTKC365/Review, April 9, 2011
Ruzich, Ashley, “mariaurora IN STUDIO AT LEEDY-VOULKOS,” Review Magazine, April 8, 2011
Thorson, Alice, “Flagship art for April’s First Friday flies high above the Crossroads,” Kansas City Star, March 30, 2011
Mejía, Gina, “Bessie Mae / Bésame en el CFMAB,” el Imparcial, June 16, 2010
Habein, Tyson, “First Friday ArtWalk,” SPOKEaNe Magazine, Saturday, October 17, 2009
Mote, Sarah, review of lacey, Kansas City Star, November 19, 2008
Lectures and workshops given by the artist
Museo Textil, Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico (2010), Whitworth University, Spokane, Washington (2009), Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri (2007), Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, Missouri (2007), Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut (2006), Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island (2004)
External links
Official site:
“Meet Our Artists / Maria Creyts,” KC Artist Link:
Flavorpill Chicago, cover art:
Categories:- Living people
- American artists
- Yale University alumni
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
