Justin Marable

A Gallery Feature

Justin Marable

Published: Thursday, February 1, 2007

Justin Marable portrait february 2006 gallery
Justin Marable

Justin Marable was raised in Robinson, a northeastern Kansas farm town. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, he, along with his four brothers, learned and wandered within the boundaries of their hometown, observing the landscape and landmarks of the surrounding areas. It was not until he returned home from his first year of attending the School of Fine Arts at KU, that he fully realized the importance of his rural experience. Through these realizations, he began to struggle with issues of cultural and social identity.

This struggle for answers has inevitably lead him back to his own personal history. The history of a place, as well as its land and inhabitants, are all vitally important in defining a community’s environmental and social conditions. In his prints, he romanticizes this idea with the use of rural landscape and landmarks. These rural devices serve to emphasize the ever-growing abandonment of small towns and farmland of the Midwest.

Photography and printmaking, particularly serigraphy, have become his methods to express social issues and past recollections of rural towns in and around the Kansas landscape. With the medium of serigraphy, or screen-printing, he can express the man-made qualities of rural architecture with a photographic stencil technique. Simultaneously, he evokes changing atmosphere within the land and skies by using monoprint and paper stencil techniques.

Within the prints and photographs, he wants to bring an awareness of current conditions to a regionally based audience, who are concerned with the emigration of small town populations and the gradual disappearance of local history.

Justin lived and worked in Lawrence for three years and graduated from KU in May 2005 with a B.F.A. in printmaking. He is now happily married, living in Topeka, and working as a full-time artist.

Justin Marable, Midwestern Castle, Silkscreen/Monoprint, 21”x15”, 2006
$310 unframed, $400 framed
Please contact the artist at just_art82@yahoo.com or www.justinmarable.com.

Reproduction or duplication of any artwork is strictly prohibited without written permission of the artist.