Artist statement

My work excavates the emotional residue of my subject matter—what’s inherited, imposed, or internalized. I move between paintings and mixed media sculptures, using my art as a way to better understand the world around me.

I’m drawn to the tension between beauty and discomfort:
fragile materials calcified into strength,
the transparent rendered opaque,
containment giving way to rupture,
soft shapes hardening.

Each work of art becomes an act of reconfiguration—of boundaries, of bodies, of usefulness itself. My process is a form of meditation, sitting with forms until they speak to me. It often begins when wandering around a Northern Marin trail, an estate sale or browsing through Pinterest, when a subject or object catches my attention and I just can’t seem to put it down.

I make work to metabolize the world around me,
to attempt to understand that which resists understanding.

I believe there’s beauty in the things we usually ignore:
the mundane, the castoffs, that which quietly endures at the sidelines.

My work asks you to look twice at what you might have otherwise dismissed,
to find presence in what once felt merely peripheral.

Just when you think you recognize what you’re looking at—
it morphs before your very eyes. ◼️

Artist bio

Mara Lantz is a Bay Area artist whose work explores what close attention can reveal about a “known” subject. Because she has aphantasia—no ability to picture an image in her mind—her practice is anchored in the forms she encounters in the world, with a healthy mix of intuition. She isolates and expands these structures, using scale and unexpected color to disrupt their usual readings.

Her paintings turn small, often ignored details into primary subjects. By shifting how they are framed, she invites viewers to see something familiar from a new vantage point—sharper, stranger, and more alive.