Joshua Marsh
Seven Cascades
July 10 - August 15, 2021

Mother is pleased to present Seven Cascades, Joshua Marsh’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The show comprises new paintings and drawings. The paintings use a high-pigment acrylic paint that generates a matte surface on canvas stretched over panel. The drawings are graphite on paper. The show runs from July 10 through August 15, 2021. Mother Gallery is located on the ground floor of 1154 North Avenue in Beacon, New York.

In Seven Cascades, Marsh presents 12 new paintings that utilize a strict palette of four colors: cobalt blue, permanent green, bone black, and titanium white. While the group of paintings was conceived as a linear sequential series, they were developed non-linearly and completed outside of that sequence. The paintings are primarily 22 by 17 inches, with one being 11 by 8.5 and another 44 by 34 inches—all based on proportions derived from the dimensions of common copy paper. Two paintings, “Incipit” and “Exeunt,” which function as the entrance into and exit out of this series, incorporate a fifth color: cadmium orange.

The sparse landscapes in Seven Cascades provide a medium for referential manipulation as well as generative ground for experiments in color and language variableness. Marsh uses these conditions to portray thought in the field of time, revealing both the elemental components of those processes and the points of connection that form networks of meaning within and between these structures. Marsh explains: “While no visual reference material was used other than invention in response to marks and materials along with the overarching structural conception of a realm of multiple intersecting causal cascades, the repetition of elements between paintings in the group became linked in a kind of entanglement, revisions to aspects of forms in one painting resulting in changes to others, whether an identical repeat or intentionally specific deviation, without one painting being the model and the other a copy for an element or sequence of element's entirety.”

The work in Seven Cascades follows the flow of creative reasoning—vectors of possibility emanate where memory and invention charge a quantum involvement. In View, we see a vista populated by drifting shapes of color—relay their differing intensities—resting on the silence of a flat emerald green field, a flash of light overexposes a sliver of the painting’s left edge. Restrained yet generous, Marsh’s paintings facilitate the cognitive modeling of superpositional states, overcoming limitations of dichotomous and linear thought processes through the playful engagement of an elastic imaginal realm.

“Destiny never consists in step-by-step deterministic relations between presents which succeed one another according to the order of a represented time. Rather, it implies between successive presents non- localizable connections, actions at a distance, systems of replay, resonance and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals, and roles which transcend spatial locations and temporal successions.” -Deleuze

-Paola Oxoa, June 2021

Joshua Marsh (b. 1973, Pennsylvania) received an MFA from Yale University in 1997 after a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 1995. His paintings and drawings have been included within exhibitions at Miles McEnery Gallery, NY; Underdonk, Brooklyn, NY; Tibor de Nagy, New York, NY; Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, MA; Teckningsmuseet, Laholm, Sweden; New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, CT; Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY; CTRL Gallery, Houston, Texas; NADA Miami, among others, and has had four solo exhibitions with Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York, NY and Hudson, NY. In 2015 his paintings were included in the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts. His work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America. Joshua has lived in West Chester, PA for the last fifteen years until recently moving to Beacon, NY.