Justin Marable

Recently, in my coming-of-age realizations, I have struggled with issues of cultural and social identity. This struggle for answers has inevitably lead me back to my own personal history. The history of a place, as well as its land and inhabitants, are all vitally important in defining a community’s environmental and social conditions. In my prints I romanticize this idea with the use of rural landscape and landmarks. These rural devices serve to emphasize the ever-growing abandonment of small towns and farmland of the Midwest. With the medium of serigraphy, or screen printing, I can express the man-made qualities of rural architecture with a photographic stencil technique. Simultaneously, I evoke changing atmosphere within the land and skies by using monoprint and paper stencil techniques. Within the prints and photographs I bring an awareness of current conditions to a regionally based audience, who are concerned with the emigration of small town populations and the gradual disappearance of local history.

Justin Marable was raised in Robinson, a northeastern Kansas farm town. He, along with his four brothers, experienced the realities and everyday existence of being small town children of the Midwest. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Justin learned and wandered within the boundaries of his hometown, observing the landscape and landmarks of the surrounding areas. It was not until he returned home from his first year of attending the School of Fine Arts at KU, that he fully realized the importance of his rural experience. At the university an interest in photography and printmaking, particularly serigraphy, became his methods to express social issues and past recollections of rural towns in and around the Kansas landscape. Justin lived and worked in Lawrence for three years and graduated from KU in May 2005 with a B.F.A. in printmaking. He is now happily married, living in Topeka, and working as a full-time artist.