Marina Kappos (42), Sun Up Sun Down

Lighthouse Works is pleased to announce Sun Up Sun Down, an exhibition from Marina Kappos.

This new series of paintings is inspired by Kappos’ time as a Lighthouse Works Fellow back in the fall of 2020 during the first year of the pandemic. Sun Up Sun Down captures that impossible feeling of time passing. Kappos recalled being keenly aware of how sunsets bathed the island in a glow. Her immersive grid of paintings tells a different sort of time, not one based on hours and days, but one based on color and rhythm.

What can we learn from the movements of the sun? How can we grapple with the relentlessness of the hours? Kappos’ labor-intensive paintings capture the dynamism and the complexity of our relationship with time. The beautiful chorus of paintings vibrates from afar, the eye not quite able to hold on for too long. They hum and beckon the viewer to get closer to where the surface unlocks, revealing dozens of intricate layers. They are fragmented. Transparent layers build onto each other like tissue paper creating a seething sense of space. Here time feels simultaneously solid and fleeting— multi-dimensional.

These twelve elegant paintings remind us that our perceptions of time are as slippery and intimate as our memories. Their bold and graphic imagery floats between the representational and the abstract, alluding to the inner landscapes of our minds. They are a sort of psychedelic Rorschach test, a place for us to reflect on how we spend our time. Do we long for connection? Do we turn inward or do we reach out to the natural world around us?

No matter what, the sun comes up and the sun goes down each day. Kappos plays with the anxiety and comfort of that inevitability and ultimately points us back towards nature, back towards connection.