Margaret Withers

The work I’ve done so far depicts the emotional landscape of my childhood as I remember it—a blur of color and movement flashing by the static iconography of the past: the company houses where the roughnecks lived, old-style telephone poles and pumpjacks. And enveloping that landscape, out of balance in scale, space, and perspective, are these figures that seem to dominate and subdue, not with violence, but with curiosity and playful interaction. Interrupting the flow of abstract shapes with simple flat black and white houses and telephone poles breaks the viewing pace, as if a light bulb pop across the setting of the implied narrative —pulling the viewer into a space undefined where they can figure out the story or pretend a new one.

Margaret Withers was born in Austin, Texas in 1965. Her father worked in the oil industry and because of the nature of the work they moved frequently, Withers’ dealt with this constant change by casting herself as both playwright and lead actor in countless fictions. She attended Texas A&M University where she received a BA in Literature. She moved to Colorado in 1991 and worked primarily in hand-built porcelain. In 1998 she started a series of mixed-media oil paintings with cast porcelain heads pushed into the canvas. In 2004 she attended CU Boulder’s MFA program but did not matriculate, instead deciding to move to New York City in 2006. In 2011 she started working primarily on paper with watercolor, ink and enamel on an overlapping series that explores migration, identity, belonging and the American anti-story.