More Than Superpower
Inside Mary Zeran's collage series, joy turns out to be the least random thing on the page
Guest Mary Zeran Writer Edgar Zhang
Mary Zeran, The Unknown is a Gift, Acrylic, Dura-Lar on panel 30 x 40 x 1.5 in. Artwork courtesy of Mary Zeran Studio
“I think I’ve always been drawn to color because of what it makes me feel. Life can get so busy and serious. I want my paintings to create a little interruption—a moment of joy, curiosity, and possibility.” — Mary Zeran
Mary Zeran says that joy is a superpower. Looking at her series, I'd argue her real superpower is quieter than that: the ability to take bold, unruly forms, like torn paper, poured pigment, a fat swipe of black paint, and land them, again and again, on a single sheet so small it could fit in your hands, with a composure that never once looks like effort.
Zeran works in collage, cutting and layering transparent polyester film she has painted with fluid acrylic, letting color slide and pool across uneven surfaces. The technique traces back to Shibori and to her own family: her mother a maker, her grandmother a textile designer. You can feel that lineage in the work. These pieces read like fabric before they read like paint… folded, dyed, pieced.
Mary Zeran, Moving Forward, Acrylic, Dura-Lar on cradled panel 24 x 24 x 1.5 in. Artwork courtesy of Mary Zeran Studio
Moving across this body of work, some colors just keeps returning. A cobalt blue stripe. A red that shows up as a solid plane in one piece and a striated, wood-grain texture in the next. It never feels repetitive, because it never repeats the same way twice, it comes in a different material, a different density, a different mood each time, so that recognizing it feels less like noticing a habit and more like recognizing a voice.
It just makes you certain, three pieces in, that you're looking at one person's hand.
And I'm sure that hand is doing something harder than it looks. Each composition reads like accumulation, like scraps gathered, brushstrokes left where they landed, edges collaged in whatever order they came. But look again and the randomness dissolves, or should I say it involved into a different one? The one that nature shows us, the loose, poured swirls of black and green are her landscape, moving like terrain around them, water flowing and finding its own level, a hillside settling where gravity put it. The pale, unpainted ground is left exactly where it needs to be left, so the eye has somewhere to rest between all that saturation. Nothing here is as improvised as it first appears. It's built, piece by piece, toward a specific feeling, the wildness. And yes, they appeared to be much more than just joy.
Mary Zeran, Didn’t Want to Be, Acrylic, Dura-Lar on cradled panel 24 x 24 x 1.5 in. Artwork courtesy of Mary Zeran Studio.
Zeran is undoubtedly a master of collage, a messenger of color. If joy is her superpower, as she says, then collage is how she proves it: page after page of evidence that something this alive can also be this carefully, deliberately true.
