Rosalyn Richards: Floating Habitats

Rosalyn Richards’s new series of paintings, Floating Habitats, evolved from earlier works influenced by geometric imagery from architecture, passages, and portals.  In Floating Habitats, she has placed a greater emphasis on atmosphere, natural phenomena, landscape, and cosmology.  This process produces a more ephemeral visual experience by using veils of color, spontaneous drips of paint, and softer edges.  Geometric forms within these atmospheric worlds serve as structural elements.  They may also appear to be adrift or unaffected by gravity, emphasizing the vulnerability of the external environment and creating an impression of suspended time.  This body of work meditates on the contrasting realms of chaos and calm, action and stillness, presence and absence.  The images are meant to raise questions about what is left behind and what rises to the surface.  Rather than moving toward a fixed meaning, the working process favors holding space for uncertainty, discovery and transformation.  Improvisation guides Richards’s practice through the acceptance of accidental visual relationships, unplanned discoveries, and unexpected occurrences.  Her hope is to invite viewers to imagine a liminal space that is spontaneous, layered, and in a state of becoming.

An opening reception for Rosalyn Richards: Floating Habitats will be held on Friday, March 27th from 3pm-5pm.

About the Artist

Rosalyn Richards is an artist and educator with a background in painting, printmaking, and drawing.  Her work is influenced by satellite photography, cosmology, and scientific imagery from biology and particle physics.  Her work is process oriented and favors improvisation, experimentation, and the emotive quality of abstraction.  Richards received an MFA from Yale University School of Art and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.  Her work is represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Guangdong Museum of Contemporary Art in China, Purdue University Galleries, among others.  She was a visiting artist at Colby College, Cornell University, Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in China, and the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.  She taught printmaking, drawing, and design at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Dartmouth College, and Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA.

Rosalyn Richards’ Portfolio Website