Mia Westerlund Roosen

Posted by Romanov Grave on Tuesday, March 1, 2016 · Leave a Comment

Mia Westerlund Roosen is a sculptor based in NYC and Buskirk, NY. Her work is included in collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Albright Knox Gallery, and Yale University. Awards include Guggenheim, Fullbright, National Endowment for the Arts and National Academy of Arts and Letters fellowships. She has had solo exhibitions at the New Museum, Storm King Art Center, Willard Gallery, Leo Castelli Gallery, Lennon Weinberg Gallery, and Betty Cunningham Gallery in New York City, as well as in galleries in Los Angeles and Chicago

Question:

You describe your work as falling into different categories. Could you talk about these different kinds of productions and their implications?

Answer:

I have always liked the discipline and the aesthetic of very reductive work, but I haven’t been able to stick with it for long periods of time. I have just flip-flopped back and forth from simple to more complex shapes. What has remained steady, however, is the desire to deal with abstraction in mostly free- standing discrete forms at a human scale. I see the challenge as eliciting an emotional and intimate relationship with a breathing object. Even with the pieces that I consider architectonic, I’m looking for a sensual, visual and physical interaction.

Bridges, 2014, concrete, size variable

But about three or four years ago I put aside my tried-and- true techniques and started assembling studio debris to form eccentric objects held together by color. I totally enjoyed doing these, but after the first burst, I froze and have only been able to do a couple of successful ones in the midst of many failures. In true form, I reverted back to simplicity and started excavating old work from the seventies. I love the serenity of these slabs, but I’m determined to try again for this elusive expressionism.