Mary Temple investigates the experiential qualities of specific spaces and explores the “tenaciousness and fragility” of memory with the regard to an environment. Here, she exhibits Winter Light, recently created at the Dieu Donne Papermill, where the image of light through a Venetian blind is rendered entirely through the handmade paper-making process. In the video Landscape Train, the image of the light cascading from the subway grate above is apparent only for a brief period of time based on the sun’s position and the weather. The light offers a faint trace of nature so infrequently visible in the subterranean setting, a fleeting connection to the world above. In the context of this exhibition, the piece reminds of the ever-present train tracks along the edge of Walden, where the train is the intrusion rather than Nature.

Mary Temple has painted many in-situ installations that simulate cast light, sometimes recording actual light patterns, other times inserting the presence of light in an incongruous way. Extended Afternoon at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT, is an installation created in three phases, or trompe l’oeil passages, that chart the movement of a beam of light across the exterior of the building into the gallery. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Trois Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta GA; Sandroni Rey, Los Angeles, CA; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; Mixed Greens, NY; and the Martin Museum of Art, Baylor University, Waco, TX. She received a Lily Auchincloss Fellowship from the New York State Council on the Arts, a Workspace Program Grant from the Dieu Donne Papermill, and was a Special Edition Fellow at the Lower East Side Print Shop. Temple serves on the Skowhegan Alliance Committee for the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where she was a resident in 1999. She earned both her BFA and her MFA from Arizona State University.

For more information: www.marytemple.com