Inside Northside Sep-Oct 2025

Chaotic Genius

By Erin M. Coswser; Photos by Sydney Johnson

The Joneses have nothing on Mary Ann Haase. They would be hard-pressed to keep up with her artwork. In fact, rather than just keeping up, it can be said that her motion-laden artistry has set a completely new standard of aspiration worthy of reaching.

Her collages exude action, both mental acuity and physical activity. She defines them as a projection of the constant action that is life.

“Life is not a perfect line. You’ll go through all sorts of ups and downs. It’s always changing. No one lives without some difficulty. There will be moments of incredible beauty and moments of incredible pain,” she said. “But there’s beauty in that constant of change if you look for it.”

Neither a pessimist nor a Pollyanna, Haase said she simply feels compelled to create.

“I don’t start out planning to make it active,” she said of her art pieces. “It just naturally comes out that way. The most authentic framework for my work comes in the form of a non-linear abstract story.”

One might describe her pieces as a confluence of chaos, chaotic yet anchored with an image from which all the movement stretches forth. This is not surprising coming from a photographer by training and education.

“Within our complex, sometimes chaotic human experience, there also exists interconnectedness, balance and beauty if we choose to pay attention to it,” she said. “My work is about the ever-winding path between.”

Haase is a mixed-media artist and photographer with fine arts and liberal studies degrees who has taught art in the northeastern United States and Italy, as well as worked as a freelance photographer and in the Cleveland Museum of Art photo department.

“It’s true that I’m trained in photography, but I never quite behaved as one in the traditional sense,” she said with a laugh. “No matter the artistic assignment or project, I somehow incorporated photography into it, but it was rarely straightforward photography alone.”

A silkscreening class turned into a means by which she silkscreened photographs on huge pieces of fabric. She once took a paper-making class where she ended up putting transfer photographs on all the paper. Even when conducting clay work for her master’s thesis, she ended up with imagery all over the pieces.

“Photography holds a dominant place in my work. I value its ability to capture a direct experience. Most curious for me is how to create photographs that are ‘unbound’ from

the confines of a viewfinder so that they can merge and integrate with new environments,” said the Mandeville resident, wife and mother of two. “I have always been drawn to photography and its ability to collect a direct experience and keep it. There are so many images that I know I will never use in my work, or anything else for that matter, but for me it is consoling to know that I have them. It’s like writing a visual history of your life, especially the beauty of it. Sometimes I make photographs that call to just be an image on its own, but more likely I find myself wanting to have more of the story. I see something that draws me in and I immediately start connecting, associating, remembering, and ultimately creating a bigger story.”

Photography is indeed the hinge pin of her collages.

“It starts with one image, one that just makes me flutter when I see it. It speaks to me,” she said. “I keep that spark in mind and the creation grows organically from there. The image reminds me of something. One image leads to others. I see them in something else I encounter. I recall a memory. I construct with the tools of balance and trust. I try to collect other elements that are true to the essence of the first images but also allow some organic growth. My visual language relies heavily on duality, metaphor, repetition, nostalgia, history, symbolism, movement and geometry.”

Such compositions often manifest upon 4-foot-by-4-foot cradled wooden panels. Sometimes they materialize on paper. There is variety in the medium just as there is in the content.

Guests at Covington’s Saladino Gallery during her upcoming show, “Everything All At Once,” may find a combination of her pieces to view. Scheduled to open in mid-September, her works will be displayed in the gallery’s atrium.

She describes the collages she intends to show as reflecting “a little bit of danger and a little bit of fun, such as a unicycle.” Titled “The Precarious Nature of Balance,” a unicycle photographed in Old Mandeville served as the impetus for her work featuring two figures of photo transfer, collage and acrylic on wood panels, reaching 30 by 40 inches each.

While much of her inspiration is local, her time spent studying and teaching in Italy is carried forward in her artistic expression as well. She speaks of her time there with a nostalgic tone.

“It was back when there weren’t a ton of tourists yet. I could grab a slice of pizza and walk around Florence,” she said. “To be surrounded by art and actually live in it, not just visit it, is an experience I absolutely treasure.”

Her love and appreciation of art is a trait she has passed down to her adult children, Walker, who has special needs, and Caroline, who works as a behavioral specialist.

“Walker makes the best marks that always feature rapid movement,” she said with a smile. “When he was younger, he was into horses and cowboys, so he made the most fun wanted posters with outrageous rewards.”

Her husband, Rick, contributes to her creativity in another way. She said he is the one she always complains to when she hasn’t quite got her work to a place she likes yet.

“I tell him, ‘I know I’ve said this before, but this one is really garbage!’” she said with a laugh. “He encourages me to keep working on it. And then an hour or so later I end up loving it.” She keeps a “bag of strange things” in her studio along with some items that “might come in handy one day.”

Some little wheels that may one day adorn the outer edge of a collage, a stack of old albums and a pile of old postcards are among the supplies awaiting possible addition to her work.

“Of course there’s always photography involved, but then I can add found objects, pieces of paper, little images, maybe old botanical drawings of trees, for example,” she said. “Words and letters represent communication. Other parts might show transportation. It’s definitely not random. Everything is incorporated for a reason.”

She adds that even the colors she utilizes reflect the certain uncertainty of living life with its forward motion.

“There may be washy blues and grays, soft and lovely, subtle colors. Mostly muted. But then there are also three blocks of screaming red,” she said with a chuckle.

Despite the ceaseless movement, there is a calming peace that her artwork exudes.

“My work and process rely heavily on the interaction of order and chaos. I continually see that circular pattern in life. Things come together, then they fall apart, and then they come together again. There is room for all of it,” she said.