Caetlynn Booth

Swamp Shimmer XIII

2017

As a continuously unpredictable environment, the swamp’s changing atmospheres and the forms that dwell within it, became perfect subjects to explore Booth's own language of abstraction and metamorphosis.

These works began at an artist’s residency at the Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge in Mississippi in 2014. Out on the water, she watched as the sky and lake flickered through innumerable colors and levels of brightness, starting before sunrise. Each phase of this transformation was compelling in relation to the forms of the swamp, becoming a sequence of backlit mirror images, tracking the passage of time. Both foreign and familiar, the grasses and cypress stumps, shape-shifting swamp dwellers, became a lexicon of hieroglyphs. In my initial attraction, and subsequent direct intimate experience with the land, the groundwork for the creation of these environments emerged.

Pulling from a wide variety of influences and experiences, past residencies, research, art history, and time spent abroad, have been essential. Roger Brown’s use of pattern and symbolism in his landscapes, Ann Craven’s ritualistic production of serial images of the landscape, and Charles Burchfield’s representation of the spiritual in his landscapes also play important roles. In combination, they have become translated environments of symbols that can be horizontal or vertical, with a foreshortened depth of field that creates spatial tension between figure and ground.

Through carefully patterned compositions filled with reflected color and playful symmetry/asymmetry, unexpected relationships between the forms of the swamp and their environment emerge, suggesting inhabitants both at one with, and apart from their mercurial native landscape.

Ultimately, Booth seeks to offer viewers a chance at contemplation, leading to a sense of hopeful possibility. Her paintings and the scenes depicted are places of reflection, and an invitation to take some time to enter into a mutable world.

Caetlynn Booth’s work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and internationally, most recently at the American Academy of Arts & Letters in New York; 245 Varet in Brooklyn, and the Arlington Arts Center in Virginia.

Booth was a recipient of both a Fulbright Fellowship and a D.A.A.D. grant for an independent painting project in Berlin, Germany, from 2011 to 2013.

She has completed residencies at I-A-M Institut and GlogauAIR in Berlin, at the Vermont Studio Center, and at the Noxubee Wildlife Refuge in Mississippi. Booth received her MFA in 2011 from Rutgers University and her BA in 2002 from the University of California at Davis. She currently lives and works in Queens, NY.