Marie Thibeault

MARIE THIBEAULT TRANSIENT PRESENCE

Transient Presence, Marie Thibeault - Represents a chance to view the recent work of Marie Thibeault. I have known Thibeault’s work for many years, a preeminent artist of Los Angeles, her work is not only astonishing, but it also facilitates important discussions about our ever-changing world. No matter a person’s position on our climate, it is Thibeault’s work that can make people aware of what is happening with our world and the consequences of their actions. In Thibeault’s paintings I see many of the areas of Los Angeles that I lived in or spent vast amounts of time in. I see the density of the area, the change of the land and a glimpse of the beauty that is still there waiting to be maintained in a better fashion.

Painting is one of the Art Department’s fundamental areas of educating new artists. Having exceptional exhibitions of painting in our galleries helps to generate meaningful discussions and lifelong learning about the art of painting. The University Art Gallery’s programing helps to support our faculty’s teaching. It is through faculty recommendations that many exhibitions come to our galleries. This exhibition was recommended by my colleague Mirabel Wigon and I am very happy to be able to exhibit Marie’s work for others to enjoy.

I would like to thank the many colleagues that have been instrumental in presenting this exhibition. Marie Thibeault for the chance of exhibiting her outstanding work, Mirabel Wigon for recommending an exhibition of Marie Thibeault, Shana Nys Dambrot for her wonderful writing, Brad Peatross of the School of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus for the catalog design and Reprographics, California State University, Stanislaus for the printing this catalog. Many thanks to the Instructionally Related Activates Program of California State University, Stanislaus, as well as anonymous donors for the funding of the exhibition and catalogue. Their support is greatly appreciated.

Dean De Cocker,

Director,

University Art Gallery

California State University, Stanislaus

ARTIST STATEMENT

Over the course of four decades, my studio work has been dedicated to exploring the effects of environmental strain on the landscape. I create large-scale paintings that blend a complex abstract language with imagery of locations altered by the effects of climate-related trauma. Our once familiar landscapes, California mountains, foothills, preserved urban arroyos, and our very lives are being continually transformed by the effects of drought, fire, and flooding with alarming frequency. I am intrigued by the multiple ways in which we perceive and attempt to arrest the effects of climate change, and how this in turn, alters our imagination and experience with the landscape. My goal is to tell a visual story and embody within painting the notions of change, flux, instability, and recalibration.

As a way of engaging the sublime, I respond to extreme conditions and events that surpass our understanding and imagination. The immense and densely built environment of the port of Los Angeles contrasts starkly with the vastness of the Pacific Ocean horizon. The abstracted horizon runs through most of my compositions, signifying the demarcation of sky and earth while evoking the feeling of symmetrical balance. Within this structure is layered a lexicon of images and forms that I have sourced from cartographic references, drone footage of flooded cities, weather charts, and photographs of direct encounters with specific places. These forms repeat and compound as they are visually imagined with a light source, density, and the pull of gravity within shifting planes of vivid color that abstract and reference the source material. While the resultant overall composition alludes to the state of collapse, the complexity is stabilized within an atmospheric color field that binds the composition into a cohesive whole.

In this way, my painting (process) metaphorically conveys the continual state of flux and reflects the transformation of our fragile environment. My work is an attempt to contain the uncontainable while recording a specific time and place in poetic form. I paint to bear witness, deepen empathy, and visualize our interconnectedness to the landscape, while also reflecting a sense of precarious balance.

Wild Gravity, oil on canvas, 78” x 75”, 2024

MARIE THIBEAULT: TRANSIENT PRESENCE

“The map is not the territory,” William Gibson wrote in Spook Country. “Perception is reality, but it is not necessarily the truth. Reality is negotiable.”

Art’s superpower is the ability to contain paradoxes, to express contradictions in visions that resonate with the hum of holistic impossibilities and the plausibility of the familiar. That is the power Marie Thibeault harnesses in her wild and willful paintings—in her twinned modalities across abstraction and landscape, imagination and observation, experience and allegory, aliveness and death; in her emotional vectors of hope, anxiety, nostalgia, fear, frustration, delight, and confusion; in her phenomenological and invented language of texture and palette; in her deft choreography of interlocking planarities of space and time; in her reverence for art history and resistance to its patriarchal values; and in her undeniable impulse to celebrate natural beauty amid the urgency of impending industrial and environmental cataclysm.

Thibeault accomplishes the delicate, fraught balance of all these factors and more by an intricate method of architecting armatures, layering elements of locations she insists on visiting, studying, and returning to over time.

Accumulating not only sensory data and observation but also personal memory, she is drawn to sites where human intervention into the natural world has left scars—developments, ruins, fires, factories, floods—as well as to places beyond its reach like the skies and far horizons. A studious walker and witness of the feral, fractal ways in which nature exerts its will to survive, and a neighbor to the terrible, beautiful, sublime infrastructure of one of the world’s busiest shipping ports, perhaps the greatest paradox in Thibeault’s work is that despite its presentation as monumental tapestries of invention, in fact they are faithful reflections of the fractured, contradictory world in which we actually live.

The pictorial space in her paintings hold a sense of precarious balance, a flickering and teetering that makes you hold your breath lest it topple, and an almost imperceptible shifting of the ground beneath your feet. The sashes, slashes, fronds, frills, swirls, blades, trunks, piles of discarded limbs, old tires, caution tape, rusty fences, muddy paths, burned trunks, and sudden shoots of green are culled directly from familiar surroundings. As she works to rebuild and reimagine the landscapes in her studio, its elements are treated with a supercharged palette that contains nature within it but goes much farther. Torn between hope and horror, Thibeault paints California as it truly is—in a constant state of rainbow and flux, disaster and dreaming.

But the dimensions do not stop unfolding there, as Thibeault is further interested in a meta-discourse on the history of landscape painting, especially within a colonialist and capitalist context—and especially the ways in which those toxic masculine systems can be subverted by a more immersive, feminist approach. One that seeks to observe, share, and repair rather than dominate, extract, and destroy. What might “California landscape painting” look like when deracinated from a legacy of conquest and transformed by an empathetic acceptance. What should contemporary landscape painting look like in the context of ecological disaster?

Thibeault’s titles are clues to the answers. The colliding realities of palms and caution tape, teal and ruby, old tires and rickety porches, goldenrod and olive that comprise Arroyo for example, exist in homage both to the place’s wildness and its fire and flood battlescars, celebrating the resilience of nature but taking note of the fragility of the dwelling. Beautiful Burnout revisits the same scene, but its bass notes of magenta, oxblood and safety orange evoke the specter of the flames and embers, and are a mood rather than a monument. In Recovery the scene is shown festooned in caution tape like unraveling bandages, its vitality is frozen in a liminal state of calm icy blue—closer to alive but far from lush—except for one proud palm tree who radiates green as an assertion of survival. Rendered in a heavy, loose hand that never loses its identity as applied pigment, trees like those occupy Thibeault’s compositions with equal presence as object, image, mark, gesture, and pure color.

Her renderings of scenes at the seaport contemplate scale, density, a terrain of interlocking geometries and distressed color stories that keep the eye in constant motion. Soaring bridge lines slice the wind as the far horizon rests as still as a carpenter’s level, the orders invert among the sea’s blues and sky’s yellows, the brutalist metal blocks play a game of stacking, arrival, departure, stasis, rust, and abandon. The implications for fossil fuel waste, energy expenditure, global trade and refuse, polluted waterways and airstreams are manifold. The way nature snuggles right up to the edge of the port’s many poisons and finds a way for grass and trees and fish and birds and humans to exist impossibly close to the heart of the beast is both tragic and impressive. Across all of Thibeault’s work, this kind of collision is a fertile place for a practice in sublime abstract landscape to thrive.

In her black and white drawings as well, Thibeault investigates the space between information and emotion. In relationship with the maps, footage of disasters, weather charts, and her own photos that animate her paintings, in her works on paper she teases out the armature of her inventions, tracing the implausible blueprints of her ideas in an intimate akin to poetry. So much more than preparatory sketches, the mixed media drawings are a way of thinking for her, a method for deeper perception and a more fundamental understanding of what she has seen. Their stability is schematic and intuitive, offering a clarity and immediacy that balances the carefully constructed, labor-intensive operas of time and space that spill from the canvas.

Another fine paradox in Thibeault’s work—but perhaps the one easiest for her to resolve, having vanquished the abstract/landscape binary—is the hierarchy and balance between form and narrative. As exciting as her innovations in form and surface, space and image are, there’s still the matter of the end of the world to deal with. We can’t luxuriate in accomplishments of technique and contributions to art history forever, not while the world is collapsing in flood, fire, and entropy and there’s so much to be done. The way she engineers her works, one notices the natural world first, only to have its degradations reveal themselves; beckoned to the canvas by an apparent beauty in subject and color, we instead witness the ungainly state of affairs come to light from within its optical folds. This emotional investment and attention yields both joy and sorrow, satisfaction and a desire to make change. In Thibeault’s art—as so often in life—the premise of a choice is a false one, we are destined to experience it all.

—Shana Nys Dambrot, Los Angeles, 2024

CautionaryTrail, oil on canvas, 36” x 36”, 2023

Arroyo, oil on canvas, 60” x 58”, 2023

Venture, oil on canvas, 60” x 58”, 2023

Beautiful Burnout, oil on canvas, 60” x 57”, 2023

Giveaway, oil on canvas, 48” x 46”, 2023

Golden State, oil on canvas, 72” x 66”, 2022

Recovery, oil on canvas, 48” x 46”, 2023

Ravine, oil on canvas, 48” x 46”, 2023

High Tide, oil on canvas, 48” x 46”, 2018

Ship, oil on canvas, 75” x 72”, 2022

Last Winter, oil on canvas, 60” x 57”, 2023

Speed of Sound, oil on canvas, 60” x 57”, 2021

Gravity’s Angel, oil on canvas, 78” x 72”, 2018

Disappearing Act, oil on canvas, 78” x 72’’, 2020

Shield, oil on canvas, 78” x 72”, 2017

Exposure, oil on canvas, 78” x 72”, 2017

Dig, mixed media on paper, 17” x 14”, 2022

Wash, mixed media on paper, 17” x 14”, 2024

MARIE THIBEAULT

Marie Thibeault is an internationally exhibited painter who currently resides in San Pedro, CA.Thibeault received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from University of California, Berkeley.

Over the course of four decades, Thibeault’s studio work has been dedicated to exploring the effects of environmental strain on the landscape. Creating large-scale paintings that blend a complex abstract language with imagery of locations altered by the effects of climate-related trauma, her compositions allude to the state of collapse, though stabilized within an atmospheric color field. Thibeault paints to bear witness, deepen empathy, and visualize our interconnectedness to the landscape, while also reflecting a sense of precarious balance.

Thibeault’s works has been exhibited across the United States and abroad in cities such as London, Tokyo, Seoul, and Dusseldorf. Her work is in the public collections of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA and the Oakland Museum of Art in Oakland, CA, among others. She recently presented a solo exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art in Long Beach, CA; and her paintings have been included in exhibitions at the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, CA; Riverside Art Museum in Riverside, CA; and Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA.

She has been Artist in Residence at L’air Arts in Paris, France; Two Coats of Paint in Brooklyn, NY; and the US-Thai Exchange Program at Silpakorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. Her work has been reviewed in multiple publications, including Art in America, the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Artillery Magazine. Thibeault is affiliated with Von Fraunberg Art Gallery in Dusseldorf, Germany and Ellio Fine Art in Houston, TX. She is Professor Emerita of Art at California State University, Long Beach, where she taught color theory and painting for 33 years.

MARIE THIBEAULT CV

Mariethibeault.com

EDUCATION

MFA, Painting, University of California, Berkeley, CA

MA, Painting, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA

BFA, Painting, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2024 Marie Thibeault: Transient Presence, University Art Gallery, California State University, Stanislaus, CA

Marie Thibeault, Von Fraunberg Art Gallery, Dusseldorf, Germany

2020 Weathering, Gremillion & Co. Fine Art, Houston, TX

2019 Conveyance, Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA

2018 By Water, By Fire, Launch, Los Angeles, CA

2017 Marie Thibeault, Von Fraunberg Art Gallery, Dusseldorf, Germany

2016 Neon Babylon, Gallery Elena Shchukina, London, England

2015 Engineering, George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA

Reference to Geometry, José Drudis-Biada Art Gallery, Mount St. Mary’s University, Los Angeles, CA

2013 Funtown: Recent Paintings, George Lawson Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2012 Emanations, Brandstater Gallery, La Sierra University, Riverside, CA

2011 Recent Paintings, George Lawson Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Kamikazi Show, PØST, Los Angeles, CA

Marie Thibeault, George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA

2009 When Worlds Collide, George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA

SELECTED TWO-PERSON and GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2024 Risky Business, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA

2023 California Abstraction, Ellio Fine Art, Houston, TX

Blue Hour: Above & Below, Kim Abeles: curator, AltaSea, San Pedro, CA

Desire Paths, Axis Gallery, Sacramento, CA

By Degrees: Art and Our Changing Ecology, Huntington Beach Art Center, Huntington Beach, CA

2022 Abstract Los Angeles: Four Generations, Brand Library & Art Center, Glendale, CA

Abstract/Not Abstract, PRJCTLA, Los Angeles, CA

Not Non Objective, Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA

2021 Inaugural Exhibition, Ellio Fine Art, Houston, TX

2020 Site Visit, group invitational, L’Air Arts on Artland, Paris, France

Small is Beautiful, Irvine Fine Arts Center, Irvine, CA

The Vista: Abstract Painting, Durden and Ray, Los Angeles, CA

Intra-Being: Ecological Civilization, Spring Break Art Show, Los Angeles, CA

2019 Break Down Build Up: Daniel Dove and Marie Thibeault, Great Park Gallery, Irvine, CA

2018 Feminine Sublime, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, CA

Color Vision, Huntington Beach Art Center, Huntington Beach, CA

Earthly Delights, Studio Channel Islands, Camarillo, CA

2017 The Reality of Nature, Launch, Los Angeles, CA

Residency Exhibition, Two Coats of Paint, Brooklyn, NY

Abstraction in the Singular, Bentley Gallery, Phoenix, AZ

2016 Abstract Mix, Robert F. Agrella Art Gallery, Santa Rosa College, Santa Rosa, CA

The Night, BLAM Projects, Los Angeles, CA

2014 Draft Punk 2: Yokohama Triennial, MidTokyo Gallery & Studio, Tokyo, Japan

Prep School: Prepper and Survivalist Ideologies and Utopian/Dystopian Visions, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA

2013 Millennial Abstractions, Marin Community Foundation, Novato, CA

2012 Turbulence, Paper, George Lawson Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

PSST, Warschaw Gallery, San Pedro, CA

Organic /Synthetic, The Art Gallery at Glendale Community College, Glendale, CA Exchange, Chandra Art Gallery, Nakhon Pathom, Thailand

2011 Case Study: Los Angeles, PØST, Los Angeles, CA

Works on Paper, Warschaw Gallery, San Pedro, CA

2010 Mass Emergencies, Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro, CA

Shock and Awe, Max L. Gatov Gallery, California State University, Long Beach, CA

2009 Elements: Water, Silpakorn University Art Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand

Fourth of July, Jancar Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2008 Some Paintings: The 3rd Annual LA Weekly Biennial, Doug Harvey: Juror, Track 16, Los Angeles, CA

Plein Air Abstraction, Peter Frank: curator, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA

2007 A Select Survey of Art form Los Angeles, Center for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA

2006 Plex, Noel Korten: curator, The Brewery Project, Los Angeles, CA

Chain Letter, Doug Harvey: curator, High Energy Constructs, Los Angeles, CA

2005 Jeju-Wind-Pacific International Exhibition, Jeju Culture and Art Center, Seoul, Korea

Color Abstractions, Travis Tower Art Gallery, Houston, TX

2004 inVERSE, Los Angeles County Arts Commission at SCA Project Gallery, Pomona, CA

Teeming Two, Sacramento State University Art Galleries, Sacramento, CA

2003 aKIN, PØST, Los Angeles, CA

2000 Inaugural Exhibition, Gremillion & Co. Fine Art, Austin, TX

1999 New Los Angeles Abstraction, California State Polytechnic University Art Gallery, San Louis Obispo, CA

1998 Practice and Process: New Painterly Abstraction in California, Armory Center For The Arts, Pasadena, CA, traveling to Richmond Art Center, Richmond, CA

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA; Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College, Claremont, CA; San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA; Cerritos College, Cerritos, CA; California State University, Long Beach, CA; IBM Corporation; Castleton Commodities International, Stamford, CT

SELECTED GRANTS, AWARDS and RESIDENCIES

2022 Artist in Residence, The Roundhouse Foundation at Pine Meadow Ranch, Sisters, OR

2018 Honorary Fellow and Lecturer, L’Air Arts Residency at FIAP, Paris, France

2016 Artist in Residence, Two Coats of Paint, Brooklyn, NY

2015 Guest Artist, Atelier 6000 Studios, Bend, OR

2014–15 Scholarly and Creative Activities Award, California State University, Long Beach, CA

2013 Beverly G. Alpay Award, Palos Verdes Art Center, Palos Verdes, CA

2012 Guest Artist, Exchange Program, Silpakorn University, Bangkok, Thailand

2010–12 Scholarly and Creative Activities Award, California State University, Long Beach, CA

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, STANISLAUS

Dr. Susan E. Borrego, President

Dr. Richard Ogle, Provost/Vice President of Academic Affairs

Dr. James A. Tuedio, Dean, College of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

DEPARTMENT OF ART

Martin Azevedo, Associate Professor, Chair

Dean De Cocker, Professor

James Deitz, Lecturer

Daniel Edwards, Associate Professor

Jessica Gomula-Kruzic, Professor

Dr. Alice Heeren, Assistant Professor

Chad Hunter, Lecturer

Dr. Carmen Robbin, Professor

Ellen Roehne, Lecturer

Dr. Staci Scheiwiller, Associate Professor

Susan Stephenson, Associate Professor

Jake Weigel, Associate Professor

Mirabel Wigon, Assistant Professor

Alex Quinones Instructional Tech II

Matt Hayes, Equipment Technician II

UNIVERSITY ART GALLERIES

Dean De Cocker, Director

Kory Twaddle, Gallery Assistant

SCHOOL OF THE ARTS

Brad Peatross, Graphic Specialist II

Marie Thibeault: Transient Presence

February 13–March15, 2024 | University Art Gallery, California State University, Stanislaus

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher. This exhibition and catalog have been funded by Associated Students Instructionally Related Activities, California State University, Stanislaus.