Laura Josephine Snyder

Tending

February 2- March 22, 2024 at Second Street Galley, Charlottesville, VA

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The imagery in the work in this exhibition is drawn from charts of ocean currents and a guide to weather symbols used for maritime navigation I encountered while at an artist residency in the Penedès region of Catalunya, Spain in 2018. These symbols conform an abstract language which I reference and transform through material-driven process.

Reminiscent of written language, the rhythmic mark-making in my work carries the memory of the movement of my hand across the page or panel, the lines shifting from dark to light as the paintbrush leaves its trace. Bright or contrasting colors on grounds of earth pigment serve as beacons or signs and punctuate the continuous rhythmic flow present in my larger, meditative pieces.

The Traveling Drawings can be folded and unfolded like road maps as I work on them, creating creases and wear on the paper. In referencing maps, I point to the history of cartography and counter cartographies, and I ask how moving through spaces or knowing places changes the traveler. The drawings begin as two stenciled lines, mirror images of one another. I slowly build up the drawings one parallel line after the next, until the undulating lines join and overlap. This meeting of the two sides of the drawings often brings unexpected consequences, including a moiré pattern. The effect, caused by overlapping two sets of slightly different parallel lines, speaks to the Surrealist notion of a “third mind” or a “third memory,” created in the space between an event and its retelling.

In the Postcards series, I explore the functioning of memory through screen-printing hand-drawn stencils over photographs from my personal archive, partially obscuring the images underneath.

I created each 9 x 12” watercolor in Tending as a single gesture followed by a series of painted lines reverberating or echoing outward in consequence. Over the course of six months, the work became a thread of belonging linking disparate places and experiences. These gestures reference the current charts I had encountered, which divide an ocean map of the into quadrants, each containing a small mark whose weight and shape expresses the median of ten years’ worth of information (memory) and can be consulted years later for navigation.

At the end of the year I arranged the separate pieces, like letters in an alphabet, to create one large work. In the photo and video documentation by Kristen Finn, the relationships between the painted shapes on the pages and the body shapes created in the process of arranging them are made visible. The final work contains a seemingly unlimited number of possible future iterations and invites the viewer to imagine them.

Tending refers to the small gestures or movements we make that lead us toward our individual and collective futures. By referencing the slow-moving cycles present in the natural world and a symbolic language that describes them, I engage with place and open-up space for new patterns of thought and movement to emerge.