Soft Time

For Wren’s last solo exhibition, she produced a series of Afterimages, of impressions of influential figures and times in her life. The Afterimages were portraiture that had little to do with how people looked. The pictures were expressive of shared history, the shape of transition, and the mark of experience. That series was born of the through-line of translating memory by searching ideas through abstraction. Five of the paintings in this show are from the 2017-2018 Afterimage series.

Wren works by the language of color, mark, and form, resisting the leading nature of representational art. She points the viewer directionally with both spontaneous and intentional gestures. Virginia Beach Origin Story, the final Afterimage of this series, she started in 2017 and finished in 2019, shows evolutions in her process.

After a year and a half of working with fast-drying materials to increase spontaneity, Wren returned to oil paint to make a new body of work. Her images are becoming more physical than ever. Exploring material and process, she leaned into pouring and soaking thick paper to exaggerate the sense of “impression.” She has completed twenty-five new works on paper. Included in this exhibition are four new pour and soak paintings. These paper works show how her intentions for line, mark, shape, and outcome have eased, indicating a softening of hand, of mind, and of time.