Mareea Farrasco’s work invites the viewer to slow down. Her images unfold gradually, offering atmosphere, emotion, and a sense of quiet attentiveness that rewards lingering rather than quick consumption. In her newest exhibition, Patchworks, now on view at PsyGallery, these qualities come together in a body of work that feels intimate, thoughtful, and deeply cohesive—an exploration of memory, identity, and place through layered seeing.
Nature has long been central to Mareea’s practice, but not as something to be merely recorded. Rather than reproducing landscapes for their surface beauty, she approaches place as an emotional and symbolic resource—something to be shaped, transformed, and imbued with personal meaning. This perspective is evident across Patchworks, where fields, beaches, trees, and skies function less as settings than as emotional states.
That sensibility extends beyond her images into the environments she creates. At IMAGOLand, Mareea’s artist-built region, the entire ground level is devoted to beach and water, designed to be inhabited rather than observed from a distance. Social spaces are intimate and thoughtfully placed; playful interactions sit comfortably alongside moments of quiet reflection. The overall feeling is rustic, gentle, and welcoming—an atmosphere that mirrors the emotional register of her art.
In Patchworks, layering becomes the exhibition’s central language. Landscapes overlap with aerial grids, figures with forests, faces with geometry. Mareea has described patchwork as “the complexity of the artistic process itself: a mixture of sensations, thoughts, memories, colors, shapes, and ideas,” and the works here embody that idea fully. No single image resolves into a singular meaning. Instead, they hold multiple registers at once, allowing memory, emotion, and perception to coexist without hierarchy.
The exhibition opens in a palette dominated by greens and blues. Works such as Wind Alert and Lonely Beach establish a sense of movement and atmosphere through sweeping brushwork that behaves like weather across the surface. Human presence enters quietly. In Green Girl with Forest Hair, a woman’s face merges with forest forms, her identity gently entangled with the landscape itself. The effect is not surreal so much as poetic—suggesting inner states rather than illustrating them.
As the palette warms into reds, oranges, and browns, time and memory move more clearly into focus. In Autumn Mix, architectural fragments and foliage are layered alongside a frozen clock, while In-Between State fractures a woman’s face with vertical bars, suspending her between sea and sky. These works feel transitional and unresolved, reflecting Mareea’s ongoing interest in shifting identities and the experience of moving through emotional and temporal thresholds.
Throughout Patchworks, figures are frequently turned away, obscured, or fragmented by paint and structure. This sense of partial revelation is a defining feature of Mareea’s work. As she notes, “Revealing everything removes mystery.” By withholding full access, she invites the viewer’s imagination into the image, transforming looking into an active, participatory experience.
Surface and materiality play a crucial role in sustaining this intimacy. Mareea’s painterly marks and textures give her digital works a strong sense of touch and presence. Even as she experiments with AI tools, the emphasis remains on intention and refinement. As she has said, “Surface and subject are inseparable,” and in Patchworks, the physicality of the image is inseparable from its emotional content.
The exhibition concludes with Breaking Through, where a woman’s face is almost entirely veiled by thick, impasto-like paint. One vivid blue eye peers through the layers, meeting the viewer’s gaze. It is a quietly powerful ending—suggesting resilience, persistence, and the self’s insistence on being seen, even when partially obscured.
Seen alongside Mareea’s concurrent exhibitions at IMAGINE and Souland Art Gallery, Patchworks feels like a mature distillation of long-standing concerns: landscape as emotion, identity as layered, and meaning as something that emerges slowly. Mareea has described her images as “small steps in an indefinite journey to myself,” and Patchworks allows us, briefly, to walk alongside her on that path.
