10/13/2025
Join us this Thursday for an informative talk by local abstract artist Maria Stabio!
Please note: the meeting will be held in the carriage house.
Meet the Artist: Maria Stabio
Maria Stabio’s luminous works are multilayer narratives crafted out of shape and pigment. Inspired by a series of trips to visit family in the Philippines, these pieces are a dreamlike web of the familiar and the unfamiliar, which speak to the disjointed experience of finding personal identity and heritage in a place that is also foreign.
Curly phone cords, radiating suns, drippy candles, sewing needles and weather events are layered alongside scenes of exploring a cave, snakes surrounding a fire, and using a flashlight. The overlaid silhouettes create a confusion of color, shape, and positive and negative space in which these identifiable subjects lose their familiarity and begin to become something new.
Over time, the artist has developed a lexicon of signifiers, symbols and shapes with unique significance. In her repeated use of particular symbols and objects, this distortion of the known world also functions to form a unique visual language—one in which images are removed from individual memories and narratives and made part of a broader library of visual meaning. In this way, Stabio’s work speaks to the formation of identity beyond direct engagement with heritage, recognizing also the way memories can be made part of a distinct personal language when they are materialized upon a canvas.
Her process resembles printmaking, as she superimposes shadow-like imprints of subjects upon each other in overlapping screens of pigment. The imprints are created using handmade stencils, crafted with freezer paper, a projector, objects such as clippings of weeds, leaves from various plants, q-tips, liquid latex, and parts of her own body.
See you at the Yuengling Mansion in Pottsville at 6:30pm!
All are welcome.
More info about the artist: mariastabio.com
