Artist Statement
Repetition is the most aggressive, relentless, tireless search of finding meaning in what you say. In New York City, repetition through multiplicity is the only constant: chattering heads bobbing through avenues cluttered with traffic moving everywhere and nowhere at once. A cacophonous chaos that is born anew with every sunrise against the city skyline. Through the noise, these reoccurring implants stick as forms of deliberate iterations of that constant. Wrought-iron gates sprawling sulky sidewalks with spires and swirls sprouting splendid, structural schemes—vertical lines stagger the street. Towers of creased, plastic bags sag together to smother sidewalks every other block.
Through the multitude of masses, I am moved by patterns formed by routine visits of these everyday objects. Overlapped stops highlight the endurance of the mundane as they are baking in its swelter or blanketed in glowing, white. As drawings, collaged, observational images are abstracted into shapes and lines, rendered in a simple black and white. In this monochromatic palette, the subdued stills are the visual landscape of this heaving, tumultuous city.
Drawing is an elegant, swift expression to replace fleeting thoughts and unspoken moments with marks. My studio practice relies heavily on gesture and line to create impulsive, reactionary drawings. This body of drawings combines personal memories, photographical references, and collaged patterning, thus creating abstracted, visual shrines for mundane objects in an urban landscape. This process involves collecting spontaneous photos of the same objects repeatedly compiling stacks of like objects. The patterning develops as overlaid time lapses: multiple shapes collaged as one through gesture and line drawing. Each new work borrows a lingering quality of pattern from the previous ones as a silhouette. Portraits of power lines mimic the structure of composition and form as the bird’s eye view from the train platform, together resembling the complete sight of the scene. As imagined, observational drawings, this series is a monochromatic tale of prolonged movement and perception of New York City’s multiplicity.
Artist Bio
Chelsea Ramirez is a mixed-media artist from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She received her B.F.A from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, and continued her study of drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art and Design in Scotland. She expects to receive her MFA from Louisiana State University, where she was an Instructor of Record for foundation courses for Drawing, Figurative Drawing, and Painting. Chelsea has attended the New York Studio School’s Drawing Marathon and ran the open figure drawing session at LSU. Her work has been at the Firehouse Gallery in Baton Rouge, the Huntsville Museum of Art in Huntsville, Alabama, Prospect 3+: BR Invitational in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 440 Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, and Denise Bibro Fine Art in Chelsea, NYC. She is living and working in Brooklyn, New York.
