Fountain Studios presents Proximity an exhibition by Brandon Larson and Joni Marie Theodorsen.

Landscapes, primarily horizon dominated landscapes, have been a consistent interest for me in painting. When you grow up in a region next to a vast geologic presence like the Pacific Ocean, the space of the horizon is there as a constant. It’s not so much sentimental as it is reliable. It is a relationship of the changing time, light & space. Its presence is fundamentally orienting, pinpointing one’s position. It is an infusion on the memory that becomes a possession to permanently carry.

My paintings address a sensibility of the horizon. They are constructions based on theories of landscape painting scrubbed clean of the subjects usually associated with landscape. Some are distilled to the horizontal and vertical while others are formed with the assembly of line in formal landscape constructs. I’ve been working with these recurring themes, as well as recurring materials cyclically, with each piece informing the next.

The space and line of my work is emblematic of a sensibility and temperament that a constant geologic presence can induce. Memory becomes translated into an object, changed, moving in and out of specificity.

-Joni Marie Theodorsen

My work in painting originates in the experience of the everyday. My primary interest is in unpacking a momentary apprehension of aesthetic engagement through the painting process. The intended result is a new image which refers to an outside reality but is not a painting ‘of’ that moment per se, rather as a painting in particular.

Thus the act of looking becomes the act of looking-at-pictures. Thus an environment, a place, becomes no-place-but-painting.

-Brandon Larson