When I first saw Mary Laube’s paintings in Studio Visit (volume fourteen), they felt familiar in a way that I couldn’t put my finger on. At first they seemed occupied with formal explorations of depth and deception, geometric space, and intricate patterning. They are hard edged or “emotionally distant,” as Laube puts it, so they obliquely delve into their subject: home, or the complex of emotion, memory, and daydreaming that pervade the architecture of home. The void of narrative is filled by your own memory or daydreaming, because, as Gaston Bachelard mused in The Poetics of Space:  “There exists for each one of us an oneiric house of dream-memory that is lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past.” If a particular architecture or color pattern evokes childhood memories, then an impossibly skewed architectural space might trigger an association in the unconscious, like a dream.

untitled, collaged papers and acrylic, 4×6.5in, 2010

To The Cellar, acrylic and oil on panel, 13x26in, 2010

Soak, acrylic and oil on panel, 13x13in, 2011

Daffodil Shrine, acrylic and oil on panel, 14x13in, 2011

untitiled, graphite and acrylic on paper, 10x10in, 2011

untitled, graphite and acrylic on paper,10x10in, 2011