MARIA STABIO
Half Double
September 3 - October 5
Opening reception: Saturday, September 7, 6-8pm

The gallery is thrilled to open our fall 2024 season with a solo exhibition of new paintings by Maria Stabio.  This is the artist's first solo exhibition at the gallery and follows her inclusion in a two-artist exhibition at the gallery in 2023.  It includes eight paintings made in a process of layering hand cut stencils and found materials such as leaves with acrylic paint in different colors.  With formal concerns that include layered shapes, pattern, and color, Stabio thematizes a variety of elements related to her Philippine heritage.  A full color exhibition brochure with a commissioned essay by New York based writer, editor, and curator Alex Santana accompanies the exhibition.

Born in San Francisco to a Filipina mother and father from the United States, Stabio makes yearly visits to the Philippines while living and working full time in Pennsylvania.  Her paintings are loving aggregations of culture as inherent, studied, and shared.  Symbols of environment such as bubbling lava, lightening bolts, palm fronds, and cumulus clouds overlap with aspects of tradition: basketballs released into the air from open hands and spoons and forks surrounding an egg, referencing traditions that range from popular team sports to shared meals.  Stabio's paintings, which emerge as sections imaginatively brought together, reflect her journey to connect with her own identity and self.  As Santana writes in the brochure essay for the exhibition:

Conceived from iconic pairings from her own Philippine background, including eggs and rice, sun and clouds, and forks and spoons, the paintings are colorful layerings of time. Stabio’s images are an amalgamation of evocative, dreamlike components that operate like how memory works: effervescent, elusive, and determined by one’s own psychological and spiritual proximity...Her works are reflections of her time spent visiting her family in the Philippines, trying to bridge that separation. They are contemplations of the artist’s intensive sensorial inquiries, carried out with an enthusiastic desire to learn. These works emerge from a fertile place of unknowing, acute listening, and active processing. They appear as generous visual notes gathered on canvas, explosive and spilling from the edge of the “page.”

Maria Stabio was born in 1985 in San Francisco, CA and lives and works in Barnesville, Pennsylvania.  She received an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2012, and a BFA in Painting from Boston University in 2007.  Stabio's works have been exhibited at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, Van Doren Waxter, New York, NY, Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY, and Pen and Brush, New York, NY, among other venues.  She has completed numerous artist residencies, most recently at Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY, 2023, and ChaNorth Residency, Pine Plains, NY, 2019.  In 2012 she was awarded an Artist in Residence Fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, where she was a resident artist and adjunct faculty member for one year.