January 2000
Maggie Butler
Maggie Butler's paintings are primitive mementos filled with funny emotional overtones, stemming from certain remnants and vignettes of her life. Her paintings "explore blurred boundaries, open to contingency and awkwardness." Her work uses narrative in an adolescent context. Flagrant Whisper's Proliferation
She compares her work to "blown out of wack children's pop-up books." Playful storybook characters, monsters, and cartoon renderings come together to form arrangements in a visually complex assemblage. Manually Controlled Mouth Curtains
"With a feeling of temporality, figures proturde off the sides, edges are torn and dirtied, and representations become elusive, ordering these solf rectangles and containing their chaos within this sort of violent playground", Maggie explains.Floater's Renaissance of an Idealized Family She states, "My aim is for discord as well as harmony, within the space created, and within the content." She feels that her work agress with Dubuffet in a sense that "art does not lie down on the bed that is made for it; it runs away as soon as one says its name, it loves to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what it is called."
