SANDRA
MUSS
Sandra Muss explores place, light, and movement in her multimedia work, which ranges from large-scale paintings and assemblages to site-specific installations.
Inspired by her travels to such diverse regions as New Zealand, the Arctic Circle, the Nā Pali Coast in Hawaii, and the Dordogne River Valley in France, Muss transposes the light and ambience of a site onto her canvas with oil, paint, and found materials. Bird feathers, tortoise shells, flowers, horseshoes, building rubble, whale bones, wood, and more enhance the texture of her layered works while creating a sense of time and transformation.
Muss joins objects from disparate sites to create large works that depict her exploration, both internal and external, of a particular location and time. The canvases become portals into the worlds where she has journeyed.
WHAT THEY SAY
Followers of Sandra Muss’ artistic career and her talent for bringing together disparate raw materials that are often derived from nature and other sources, will no doubt be surprised and delighted with her latest works. Her new series “Permutations" incorporates re-used industrial doors that are scratched and nicked and weather-worn by decades of factory life, which she now repositions as structures that not only serve metaphorically as gateways to other dimensions, they also collectively represent the experiences of life, both spiritual and emotional. With these new pieces, Muss becomes a visual alchemist who enjoys the challenge of abstractly illustrating with her doors the choices we make throughout our lives; bringing us love, growth and life-transforming opportunities.
– Bruce Helander
HUFFINGTON POST
ARTIST STATEMENT
"My body of work attempts to uncover and reinterpret the histories of disparate objects and the places they’re from. I’ve employed such materials as bird feathers, tortoise shells, stretchers, flowers, horseshoes, building rubble, whalebones, and wood, which I’ve encountered through my travels around the globe. These objects, when paired with each other – oil sticks, paint, and a sense of light – give us insight into the larger mysteries of our natural world. I weave personal reflections of my journeys into the work and represent them on canvas. The power of the sun, earth, water, and all of nature manifests itself through different combinations of color, markings, and found objects.
My foremost collection includes work that combines painting and assemblage. I take inspiration from artists who have manipulated paint and layered different media in refreshing and challenging ways, such as Richter and Rauschenberg. I have also worked in sculpture and neon light installations. Currently, I am working on a sculptural installation entitled Ode to Damien. In the work, I reimagine Hirst’s Medicine Cabinets by replacing the many pills (and other types of Western medicine) with the various plants that define the cannabis family. Throughout all of my works, a sense of reverence for the natural world persists."
Sandra Muss
IN THE PRESS
