WALKING BLINDLY INTO SHADOWS

MaryKate Maher

April 18 - May 31

Opening Reception: April 18 from 6 to 8 pm

KALINER is pleased to present: MaryKate Maher, Walking Blindly into Shadows, an exhibition of recent collage and sculpture that expands the artist’s novel approach to material and process.

Maher takes inspiration from archeological relics attributed to the Inuit: small, hand-held sculptural maps of the arctic coastline and surrounding islands. They are wooden and tooth-like, with carved channels that represent walking paths. The maps are not only meant to be seen with the eye but also felt roughly beneath the thumb. The maps are never finished, as melting ice and freezing seas reshape the shifting coastlines. The exhibition Walking Blindly into Shadows is grounded in ideas of mapping the intangible—how we chart spaces that are not fixed or fully visible. The title itself evokes a paradox: a shadow or void is both a thing and a non-thing, simultaneously present and elusive.

“How do you understand a space that is intangible yet visible?” asks MaryKate Maher. “As an artist I work to give that intangibility a form: tracing an outline, blurring a line, squinting at the shadow. Making it physical.”

-MaryKate Maher

This ongoing exploration of the void continues in Maher’s new works, where shadows appear as gradients, shifting tones that hint at shape without fixing it. The phrase “walking blindly” speaks to a trust in process—moving forward without certainty, guided by instinct and faith. This resonates with Maher’s interest in the lives of nomads and ‘temporary inhabitants’—those who navigate constantly changing terrain, both literal and psychological. Working abstractly means the path isn’t always clear, but the thread is there, and it’s worth following.

Maher uses hands, eyes, and body to navigate the ever-changing outline of invisible spaces. She finds forms through forging into the unknown based on feel, discerning boundaries by touch and intuition; skimming the outline, rounding into indentations. She builds images and sculptures whose purpose is their own making - they serve as records of a journey.

"For several centuries, women's bodily sight was thought to be particularly powerful (and dangerous, if inflected with malintent). A popular theory held that vision did not enter the eyes from the world but rather emanated from the eyes, meaning that looking could alter or affect its target." -Elvia Wilk, Death by Landscape.

Maher uses UV prints of her own photographs—featuring “voids” in varying hues—mounted on aluminum. She then cuts and shapes the metal planes to serve as the foundation for her collage and sculptural works. The artist builds them up in flat layers of gradients and edges. The illusion of depth emerges suggesting landscape and body motifs without ever quite materializing into representation. In works such as Coordinate (eye), these shadowy forms take center stage. Their smooth and disjointed topography map the passage of their own creation.

In Coordinate (orange), delicately bent metal is intersected by a protruding rock. Nearby objects are affixed to the space as if floating. Their color plays between muted and fluorescent. Their shape draws from Maher’s personal visual language of ovals and semicircles. We are drawn in by these dense loci amid atmospheric color fields. We lock eyes with the tear-drop shape, the eye. We recognize ourselves in the act of perception.