Art on Campus
CAPS SMALL ART COLLECTION
MARIE THIBEAULT
Heliostation, 2014
Marie Thibeault
Oil on Canvas
72 x 66 inches
Location: Fine Arts Building, East Foyer, First/Second Floor
Marie Thibeault’s large-scale oil paintings address the tension between the urban landscape and the natural world. The imagery is informed from the artist’s immediate experience of living near the expansive industrial Port of Los Angeles. While referencing the surrounding landscape with atmospheric color fields, her work contrasts industrial structures with organic forms to suggest the ideas of flux, change and instability in our environment. Visual elements observed in the natural world are interpreted onto the canvas, intrinsically transforming the exterior into a metaphorical landscape. In the negotiation of history, space and time, technological landmines allude to a dichotomy of progressive and destructive systems. Disaster sites, weather lacerated trees, and abandoned amusement parks all become kinetic structures, brushed scaffoldings that are manifested into synapses of distributed sign systems, reverberating hues of oil cross pollinating over entropies shifting the polarities of figure and ground. Her large painting, Heliostation, is inspired by an uncelebrated Ukranian heliostation built in 1967 that continues to explore possibilities of solar energy.
Marie Thibeault’s work has been recently featured in exhibitions such as Conveyance, at the Long Beach Museum of Art, The Feminine Sublime at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, and Color Vision, at the Huntington Beach Art Center. Recent solo exhibitions include Illuminations at Von Fraunberg Gallery in Dusseldorf, Neon Babylon, at Elena Shchukina Gallery in London, Engineering at George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco, and Broken Symmetries, Torrance Art Museum in Torrance, CA. She has recently completed a residency at Two Coats of Paint in New York, and twice participated in the US Thai Exchange Program at Silpakorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. Thibeault received her BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from UC Berkeley. She is currently a Professor Emerita of Art at California State University, Long Beach, where she teaches painting and color theory.
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