May 3 – June 17, 2017
Mayme Kratz is a mixed-media artist best known for creating art inspired from the natural life of the desert that surrounds her Phoenix, Arizona home and studio. A passionate wanderer and garden lover, Mayme Kratz creates sculptures using found organic fragments, desert ephemera and resin. Foraging the landscape on hikes through the high deserts of the American Southwest or in her own backyard, she collects seeds, flower pods, bones, wings, vertebrae, shells, as well as birds’ nests, twigs and branches--all dried and preserved in the harsh desert environment.
With great reverence for the natural world, Kratz creates cast resin pieces of fragile beauty locked in fluid translucent resin. The artist embeds her found objects, sometimes spliced or broken apart and arranged in precise patterns, in luminous, cast-resin wall panels and vessels. Kratz sands and grinds the surface of her panels until the interior structure of her gathered materials gradually emerge as abstract lines, circles, and spirals that reveal a kinship to the vastness of the ocean or night sky. Often cyclical in composition, her hauntingly beautiful sculptural and two-dimensional resin works reflect themes of beauty, memory and longing.