Jamie Brunson and Nina Tichava: New New Mexican Abstraction

Nina Tichava was born in Vallecitos, NM, and was raised between rural Northern New Mexico and the Bay Area, California. Jamie Brunson, on the other hand, was born in Coronado, CA, and built her career in the Bay Area, only recently moving to Northern New Mexico. However, both artists are interested in time and place, and the influence of these concepts in their work is subtle yet undeniable.

Brunson's work has historically focused on the sensory experiences that occur in meditation practice. Since moving to New Mexico three years ago, elements of the environment, landscape, and architecture have increasingly influenced her compositions, expressed formally as saturated color, rhythmic intervals, geometric divisions, and tactile surface treatment. The final product evokes internal and external landscapes and shifting atmospheres. The process becomes the practice of staying grounded in the present through the immediacy of sensation.

Tichava works primarily from a procedural stance. Her art is about relationship, and her focus is on the interplay of elements and materials. Her process is best described as weaving, as she combines painting and printmaking techniques, drawing and collage, in a fashion both liberated and constrained. Tichava’s mother was a New Mexican weaver in the more traditional sense, and Nina’s paintings explore how to weave oneself into a tight knit, traditional community as a relative outsider. She weaves New Mexico’s historic aesthetic with contemporary concepts. Recently, the sudden and urgent sacredness of our natural environment has become Nina’s focus. Her Borrowed Landscapes series aims to find a new perspective and reconnection to the land and the people who call it home.