Strange Vistaby Mary Celeste Griffin

In Strange Vista, Mary Celeste Griffin (b. 1986, Flagstaff, AZ) traces personal and environmental narratives across the vast landscape of the American Southwest. In layering together different temporalities into strange vistas and landscapes, Griffin employs a materially peripatetic approach to image-making, constructing her paintings and works on paper from oil, acrylic, charcoal, and spray paint, while also including garments saved from the decade she spent thrifting clothes, antique feedbags passed down from her grandmother, ephemera from art exhibitions and punk shows in Arizona, and holographic wrapping paper. By using innovative approaches to image-making to both materialize the landscapes of her youth and metaphorically imbue them with redolent personal memories, Griffin creates a poignant body of work that, instead of viewing landscape as a mere snapshot of a notable place, reveres it as a deeply inscribed and fragile container of countless sacred lives.