Marika Szabo
Last year, on a trip to Nogales, I encountered the border between U.S. and Mexico. As an immigrant to several countries in my life I have experienced many national borders but this one, defined by a particularly distinctive fence, resonated strongly with me.
This started me thinking about the larger implications of fences and by extension other "lattice-like" structures/grids/maps of human organization; traces so commonplace as to disappear before our eyes. I began to speculate on the interplay/intersection of my daily human activity, which by its organic nature is complex and unpredictable and these "unseen" grids.
I am by temperament drawn to geometric abstraction in the form of grids and lattices so these ideas dovetailed nicely with my Nogales encounter.
My current series of collagraphs, Urban Traces, represents the collision of life and rule. They reflect the meandering traces of my daily life in the form of found objects. They are a mapping of serendipity upon a rational grid. They represent to me a myriad of relationships between life and "unseen" cultural constructs.
