Catherine Rupan Mapp

Artist Statement:

My aesthetic sensibilities come from a merger of my Indo-Carribean, Cuban and Indigenous Mexican heritage, where colorful palates are often used in spiritual expressions of ritual, sacred space and celebration. This immersion into the extremes of color began with experimentation in black light reactive paint, a love of hypnotic electronic music and deep fascination for the textile traditions of my lineage. I quickly found that the sensory deprivation created from painting under the glow of black light and thundering drums produced a highly meditative and heightened state of conscious, intuitively weaving a piecemeal understanding of ancestral identity to the empty framework of modern life. These works connect the legacies of traditional cloth patterns using of the universal language of Sutratman (thread-spirit), application of methods of textile adornment (such as block printing or silk screening to build up layers of texture and color) to the repetitive mark making of ritual artifacts and the shamanistic experience of electronic music. This is transformed into a visual language with the vibrations and hums of color and their optical movements. Their vibrancy and maximialism characterize a certain amount of playfulness, disorderliness and anxiety surrounding the absurdity of modern life.