Mary Pinto is an artist based in New York City who combines photograms of plants into pigment-like components. Pinto’s weave and weft of leafy silhouettes with traces of found, printed texts are ultimately coated with paint, resulting in prismatic renderings that alternate colors with natural forms. The artist also incorporates traces of found, newsprint texts that offer up and subtly question the use of word and image as two viable sources of information.

Cut-Out #2 (Bouquet) from 2013 absorbs the shape of a blue tulip bouquet into a black void. A layer of green plants appears behind the flowers, recalling the arbitrary process of representation. The stark oppositionality between blue, green and black becomes subdued within a small-scale diptych titled, Night and Day (2012), where a purple-coated canvas covers four juxtaposing lines of text. A bright yellow panel, on the right, presents a photograph of a green plant where the artist inserted four cuts as if to remove the brightness of overexposure.

Tower of Babel (Madame Interpreter) (2015) shows a free-floating series of newspaper and photographic reproductions, offset by penciled lines and ink drawing. Each component is arranged as a series of thought bubbles that circulate across composition, suggesting a figure for pluralism. City Garden (2015) transforms the subject of nature itself into a cross-hatch of loose, leafy but colorful photographic paper.

Since 2005 Mary Pinto has exhibited frequently throughout New York and New Jersey. From 2003 to 2005 Pinto received annual Residency Fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A Residency Fellowship with the Artists’ Enclave at I-Park followed one year later in 2006. During 2014 Pinto participated in Salonukah, a group show that was hosted by the Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. The artist’s work has also appeared in five group shows during 2015 such as Respond at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, New York; After Image at Art House Productions in Jersey City, New Jersey; and I Catch the Pattern at the Langston Hughes Cultural Center in Queens, New York. Mary Pinto received her Master of Fine Arts from the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College, and her art is featured in the Joan Flasch Collection at the School of the Art Institue of Chicago as well as the Library of Congress.