Lydia Gravis / Survival and Resilience

Driven by her desire to respond to the intangible human experience, Lydia Gravis creates empathic work. She uses mark-making as a way to connect to the external world as well as the world within. This effort serves as a radical act of sanity, imperative as she navigates the often-overwhelming nature of the contemporary world.
As Gravis creates colonies of marks and lines, they become personified in her mind and assume individual behaviors. Can she make them cooperate? Can a line re-write a troubling human narrative? Rather than working from the specific to the abstract, Gravis begins with an abstract essence, like the idea of liminal psychological space, and suggests its specificity through visual language. She uses mark-making and obsessive micro-textures to express the tension between overwhelming experiences she does not understand, while simultaneously being seduced by her desire to understand them more clearly. By conjuring and obscuring biomorphic shapes with graphite and water media, she depicts the infinite psychological spaces of human experience, giving the illusion of form to what is simultaneously formless.
This body of work evolved from life experiences that include profound grief and immense personal growth, much like what we have collectively endured over the last two years during the Covid-19 pandemic.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Lydia Gravis earned her BA in painting and drawing from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC, in 2003 and her MFA in visual art from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University in 2013. Her work has been shown in numerous group and juried exhibitions in the United States. Her solo exhibitions include Northern Arizona University Museum of Art, Nox Contemporary, Phillips Gallery, and Argo House Gallery in Utah. Gravis was recently awarded an artist residency at the Fremantle Art Center in Fremantle, Western Australia for Summer 2022. She works as the Gallery Director and Curator of the Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery within the Department of Visual Art and Design at Weber State University, and currently lives in Ogden, Utah with her husband and two young children.
www.lydiagravis.com

Event is free and open to the public.

Granary Arts is supported in part by Utah Division of Arts & Museums, with funding from the State of Utah and the National Endowment for the Arts, The Sam and Diane Stewart Family Foundation, The Paul T. Walton Jr. Charitable Foundation, George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation, Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, The Ephraim City RAP Tax Fund, Mormon Pioneer National Heritage Area, Sanpete County Travel, and generous support from Ephraim City.