Mari Eastman is a mixed-media artist whose heart belongs to a relatively old-fashioned form of picture-making. Ms. Eastman veers from painting to drawing to illustration and beyond, working on canvas, on paper and on the wall. She uses glitter, stencil and stain painting; she works from photographs, manages some crude embroidery and also paints on handmade clothes.

Images don't always conform neatly to a single surface, but travel across several, most spectacularly in the case of a spray-painted mountain range that moves across the entire length of the gallery, figuring in most of the paintings and drawings that cross its path.

A result is a pictorial installation that mixes early 1980's appropriation with early 90's abject art, and has a light, improvisational touch of its own. Ms. Eastman's subjects, which range from fashion models to eagle's nests, lone wolves and Bambi-like deer, alternate nature with culture, urban with wild, but tend to conjure one kind of romance or another.

Published on occasion of Nieves Library
at Ooga Booga in Los Angeles
March 7th – April 3rd, 2008