MAGGIE MAILER: COVET - The Starry Outpost

Featured artist in COVET - an exhibition of new paintings.

August 4 - September 8, 2012

 show overview

Ferrin Gallery is pleased to present The Starry Outpost, a featured artist presentation within the COVET project by accomplished painter MAGGIE MAILER. The Starry Outpost is a collection of new paintings and drawings which expand the narratives of her two previous bodies of work, The Volcano Sitters and The Balloonists. This new series depicts locations, characters, maps, and plots that present a constellation of facts and images which form the foundation for an imaginary novel.

The narrative's current incarnation presents a group of 18th century aristocrats and end-time enthusiasts who prepare for their final moment by frolicking in regal gardens, awaiting deliverance to a distant star paradise called The Starry Outpost. There, a mythical city runs on the imaginal energy of Tantric Beings and embraces those in transit from one life to the next. The spiritually ready are instructed in the art of building their own reality, while the egotistically inclined are relegated to a false paradise in the region of The Empty Water Bodies of the Moon.

The story's protagonist is a member of this latter group, an architect who has lost his memory in the passage between worlds, and devotes himself to building a palace which will hold his retrieved memories. His secretary and secret love is a starry eyed painter, who records everything in paint, in hopes of mapping a way back to The Starry Outpost.

The works consult an open-ended timeline of world history, applying references from Mayan cosmology, Renaissance printing techniques (Incunabula), garden architecture, astronomy, and the Floating World.

Mailer, the daughter of author Norman Mailer and jazz singer Carol Stevens, is one of the region's well known contemporary artists. After graduate school she returned to Pittsfield, MA and established her studio in a vacant storefront on North Street; a number of other artists followed suit. In 2003 she created the Storefront Artist Project and became an early contributor to the revitalization of Pittsfield. This is her fifth solo exhibition at Ferrin Gallery.