Julie Maren creates flexible and adaptive “Biophilia” wall-sculptures/ installations out of acorn tops filled with paint and other material, mounted on brass rods. Appearing as bouncing dots of color, projected at different depths on the wall, these multi-dimensional “paintings” play with shape, color theory, microscopic and macroscopic perspectives - and transform with light and shadow.

Biophilia wall-sculptures are the result of her journey to take her paintings out of the confines of traditional square and rectangular canvases. She found paint filled acorn tops to be the perfect vehicle to transcend the omnipresent dot patterns in her paintings, indicative of space and time - and transform them into expansive, multi-dimensional murmurations of color and shadow - like coordinates on a three-dimensional grid.

The combination of the natural, familiar acorn tops filled with synthetic materials feels simultaneously familiar yet mysterious, and reminds of an engineered symbiosis or connectedness of nature and the artificial. Mare likes using fluorescent and intense colors because it feels like she is reanimating the “dead” shells that nature has discarded, into new seductive organisms which appear to glow from within. Nature informs the palettes and biomorphic patterns of each installation - from the microscopic world of bioluminescent organisms on a beach to the macrocosm of star galaxies above.

The opening reception will feature valet, cocktails, mocktails, light bites, and a sit down artist talk between Maren and Creative Experience Director, Charlie White.