ATLANTA, GA.- These days, global warming, the despoliation of our environment, and the loss of fragile ecosystems are front of mind - of my mind, at least. Having grown up in Louisiana, I know too well how the effects of toxic dumping combined with global warming have destroyed most of Louisiana’s wetlands providing next to no barrier for the destructive force of hurricanes. Activism comes in many forms. One ingenious friend has taken her knowledge of concrete to create man-made reefs that support sealife creating beds for oysters, the ocean’s own filtration system. Other people support environmental groups and write to their elected officials. But one person, Corrine Colarusso, makes paintings bursting with the light and energy of our natural world and invites us to marvel at the worlds inside worlds in a tide pool, or the buzzing, waving forms of marsh grass melded into the atmosphere of twilight.
For her second solo exhibition at {
Poem 88 }, Every Leaf a Shelter, Corrine Colarusso reminds us of the private moments afforded us in communion with the natural world. For the past forty-five years, Colarusso has been offering up paintings teeming with vibrancy and dreamlike visions. Painted in layers of acrylic on canvas, the works are luminous and evocative. They appear like fragile mountains composed of grasses, plants, insects, water, and light.
She says: Paintings are restless creations. We collect fragments of ideas and images, and then try to map them where they are, to find connections to the signals, patterns and mysteries of what we see.
In these new paintings, I describe the landscape in clusters of reeds and grasses becoming chambers, channels, and shelters, – tent like formations of switchgrass or miscanthus as architecture under big sky and distant views. I paint these images not only for what they are, but for what else they are, how they help us see and understand what we need in nature. Every leaf a shelter, in the back yard, and in painting.
Colarusso invites us into that shelter through this body of work so we might recollect our first joy in nature and take care to cherish it and preserve it.
Colarusso has been the recipient of numerus awards and grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment of the Arts Grant, A Fulbright-Hayes research and travel grant to India and Nepal. She has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, the Cortona Program of the University of Georgia, Cortona, Italy, the Ossabaw Island Project, Ossabaw Island, Georgia. She organized and curated Painters’ Reel, Contemporary Painting in Georgia, an exhibition which traveled to the Macon Museum of Arts and Sciences, The Jepson Center for Contemporary Art in Savannah, and the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia, during 2009 and 2010. She taught at the Atlanta College of Art (now SCAD) from 1975-1996. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently at the Georgia Museum of Art 2019-2020. Her work is included in many museum, private and corporate collections such as the High Museum of Art, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Atlanta Gas Light, Roberto Goizueta School of Business Library, Emory University, Coca Cola Inc., Troutman, Sanders, Lockerman, & Ashmore, Equifax Corporation, and King and Spalding, Inc.
