Sharon Kagan: Exploring Fiber

Exhibition Website

Oct 26 2018 - Jan 2 2019

MacNider Art Museum

Mason City, IA

The Charles H. MacNider Art Museum is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent drawings, paintings and fiber sculptures by artist Sharon Kagan. Sharon Kagan: Exploring Fiber is now open in the Museum’s Kinney-Lindstrom Gallery.

Through her recent visionary paintings and drawings of highly abstracted fibrous forms, Sharon Kagan wants to expand and reinvigorate an elevated consciousness of being and of non-separateness. In her artist’s notes she writes, “I am looking to make the eye vibrate.” In so doing she anticipates creating a multi-dimensional sensorial and perceptual experience for the viewer that will render it unforgettable.

At the heart of Kagan’s art are massively enlarged, blurry, 3 mega-pixel photographs of close-up details of knitted stitches which she then transforms using Prismacolor pencils and acrylic paint. The artist’s enlarged color-speckled strand-like forms seem to operatically swerve and loop within the field of vision. That field is a deep space that is given breadth and dimensionality by the artist’s application of a linear superstructure of gridded units that imbue her work with a rational system.

Sharon Kagan’s intensely detailed, finely colored and systematized paintings and drawings reveal a unique approach to image-making and a vision that straddles the worlds of appearances and essences. Her unique tonalities and systematized touch create radiant artworks that appear to be illuminated from within. The artist’s specially fabricated wall structures are canvas-covered wood panels with beveled edges that give the optical sensation of hovering in front of the wall as her intricate compositions emanate with other-worldly, vibratory power.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website 

  • Various Media
  • American
  • Contemporary
  • Sharon Kagan

Exhibition Venues & Dates