XIANGJIE REBECCA WU : Blue Murmur

Marvin Gardens is pleased to present Blue Murmur, the debut solo exhibition of painter Xiangjie Rebecca Wu. These ten mostly intimate sized works take the artist’s personal memories from childhood as their main generative force. The color scheme of predominant blues mixing with warmer tones have an antiquing effect to the surfaces, and come from the Wu’s impression of living with the humid air of the Yangtze River mixing with cobalt blue window frames and jade green plaster walls. Many of the images have a snapshot quality to them, taken as quiet moments, built with dry oil paints, mixing colors often without added medium. Wu says of these images that they embody mourning over the loss of the moment they depict. The act of painting this moment in an attempt to recreate it, or to let it live again, strikes one as an apt way to engage in the solitary act of painting. To keep it close, with sincerity, without a need to perform for a larger community. Or rather, the intimacy of these works is the very door that the rest of us walk through. The images themselves suggest marking time in different ways. A lamp suggests a time of night, as does a view out of a window suggest time of day. A pack of cigarettes is a collection of time markers in and of itself. A mirror, for the user, has an extended view of witnessing time. The object itself bound by the time it was made, demarcated by style. However, what it reflects may transcend its own era, while also signaling these memories are for and of, us as well.