The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

WAITSBURG-Artist Rachel Maxi is relaxing after a busy Labor Day weekend. Her latest work, Continuing Explorations, opened to a warm reception over the weekend at Art X Agent. The show, consisting of abstract paintings and sculptures, is a departure from her previous work yet maintains the same themes: landscape and architecture.

Maxi has been pushing paint across canvas for over twenty years. She moved to Seattle in 1990 where, working as an art handler for Seattle Art Museum, her work grew both figuratively and literally. The artist began with assemblages from found objects, then, as studio space became limited, shifted to smaller landscape paintings.

"I did 133 of those," shares Maxi. "I did paintings of dumpsters that people loved. Iconic stuff, like a big painting of a baseball. I liked to play with scale." Over time, though, Maxi grew weary of merely rendering an image.

"I just lost patience with the process of copying something," says Maxi, "there wasn't any joy in it."

What brought on the change? Some of it sprung from trauma that occurred in 2015, when Maxi was hit by a car, the subsequent recovery, and the complicated joy of pressing on through darkness.

"There's this whole thing about using your brain differently when you've had a head injury," Maxi recalls. In that vein, Maxi reached outside of her comfort zone to study ceramics. While she didn't think much of her wheel work, the idea of carving, and of creating something without a reference photo or still life was her takeaway.

"My other work seems more linear. There was a destination and I just had to get to it. This is just more cyclical; nonlinear. Now there's many things happening on all fronts, but slowly."

The theme of architecture is fundamental to her core as a person and her work as an artist. "I love building things. I build a lot of my own furniture." So, in the absence of wood and screws, or building blocks, Maxi erects topographical maps of still life as yet unposed.

In GREEN PIECE, this verdant, particularly rich shade of green is contrasted against bone white, a combination that came about from some watercolors Maxi did during an artist residency in Morocco in March 2018. "The place I stayed in was white stucco, old medina, and I remember this white and green a lot," Maxi continues, "I love those colors."

Lane Gwinn

Paint Cups, an ongoing project

In Divine Mind, familiar elements like a kettle's spout appear alongside passageways unseen. There is no sense of ground, yet there is a foreboding gravity. It took the better part of six months to paint and, at 50" x 62", over five feet in one dimension, it is a physically engaging piece that sends the eye on an unending journey.

Some of Maxi's smaller paintings are encaustic works suspended in Moroccan beeswax and some are gilded in gold. Encaustic seals. Gold covers. When gold is on the wax it takes on a soft quality. The effect is mosaic.

Accompanying the paintings are sculptural works that Maxi calls meditative drawings. Maxi retraces her found object roots with cups from Seattle-area bakeries encased in, filled with, and anchored by oil paint.

They stack in towers. They hide secret compartments held closed with magnets and stoppers.

There is much to see, both in the gallery and on the artist's website. Art X Agent is open Saturdays 12-6 p.m. or by appointment. Find more information at: http://www.rachelmaxi.com