Mariah Boyle exhibit at EWU Gallery of Art

CHENEY – Eastern Washington University Gallery of Art presents In the Air and Underground, featuring the work of Mariah Boyle, March 17 through April 23, 2021.

Boyle received her bachelor of arts from Eastern Oregon University in La Grande in 2009 and a master's of fine arts from Washington State University in 2012. She makes mixed-media drawings that are based on the interactions, intersections and interconnectedness of people and the natural world.

Most of Boyle's works are based on a visitation to a specific landscape to observe and collect details that develop into a place-specific series of artworks. She is interested in how people use, view and experience nature from multiple points of view, including depictions through old technology (maps, graphs) and new ways of seeing (images on a screen). She also explores the history, ecology and use of land and resources. This series is based on several imaginative drawings of the Chihuahuan desert.

The artist was struck by the vastness of the Chihuahuan desert, a desolate landscape that stretches from northern New Mexico and into northern Mexico. She was particularly surprised at both the beauty of White Sands National Monument (a now protected natural area) and the fact that this place was also located in the middle of a U.S. Army missile range.

White Sands National Monument features unique ecology unseen anywhere else in the world. The white gypsum fields and dunes are home to many plants and animals who have evolved for survival in this specific and harsh landscape. The White Sands site is also close in proximity to where the world's first atomic bomb was secretly tested, 210 miles south of Los Alamos, N.M., on July 16, 1945.

The work presented here is a conglomeration of drawings made before, during and from subsequent research after her visit. Initially, Boyle had intended to show these works during July 2020, to mark the 75th anniversary of the first atomic test.

Boyle has exhibited her work at galleries throughout the Northwest ranging from southern and eastern Oregon to southeast and south-central Washington to Spokane and now Cheney. She has won several awards and grants, including most recently in 2015 the Ford Family Foundation Golden Spot Award and the Oregon Arts Commission Career Opportunity Grant, both from Portland Ore. Serving on a number of projects and several residences, Boyle has been a tenured art instructor at Spokane Falls Community College since 2015.

Gallery of Art exhibitions have moved to a new online gallery space while EWU's physical gallery is closed. The exhibit can be viewed at http://www.ewu.edu/cale/art/gallery/.