Baltimore, MD
12,000 years ago, giant walls of ice, as tall as skyscrapers, covered the Northern United States landscape leaving gestural carvings in its wake. Despite these processes occurring thousands of years ago, they still inspire inexplicable emotional responses and shape the world we live in today. Demaria is interested in capturing the feelings emotions the landscape evokes and preserving memories he finds in the landscape.
By carving copper plates, like the landscape in the American Northeast was carved by glaciers, Demaria attempts to form a connection to structural framework beneath what he observes. For traditional prints like Portraits and other Fractured Landscapes, he combines engraving with etching to explore his interests in a specific place. For this artwork he abstracts the landscape through the language of broken glass to try to capture a beautiful but shattered and fractured gorge in Ithaca NY. For monoprints, he combines engraving with experimental printmaking techniques similar to painting. These series develop over time and the repetitive processes of printing monoprints helps Demaria realize his memories in his artwork. For artwork like Faraway Memory, he explored his fascination with the feelings of vertigo that transformed the solid geometry of cliff edges while hiking into something that felt fluid and ephemeral.
Be it geologic history living in the natural landscape, human history preserved in the constructed landscape, or even quiet moments in the woods that exist only for a matter of seconds, Demaria’s artwork captures his fascination for what came before and how it is remembered.
