CONEY ISLAND / American-Dream-Land

 "American-Dream-Land is a  series of buoyant and poignant cut paper portraits  of Coney Island;  an American icon of escapism in transition." 

 

I grew up just a few stops from Coney Island, my "urban exotica". I used to imagine  the elevated train was a roller coaster that picked us up out of the ordinary hum drum & took us to an extraordinary world of raw excitement.

 

I titled my earliest works "Unkept Promises" as they expressed the desolate amusement park I found when I began my return visits in the late '70s;  a steep contrast from the rowdy & vibrant scene I knew as a child.

The cut paper medium that I had become so proficient at while working as a an artist assistant to Robert Indiana,seemed perfectly suited for portraying the visual poetry of Coney Island ; a world of erector set skylines, bold layered color & lyrical lines- a marriage of medium to subject which became apparent with my first evocation in the series; a portrayal of the sublime punch of a Mangels Shooting Gallery dense with stars, targets and ducks.

 

After forming The Coney Island Hysterical Society in 1981 and working on art/ revitalization projects on site, I became more intimate with the iconography, landscape & people of Coney Island. In 1990 I changed the title of my series from 'Unkept Promises" to  "American-Dream-Land."

"The vivid colors of the layered paper positively vibrate against each other, infusing Marano's art with great visual energy heightened by the knife-edged contrast of the cut pieces."

-Rick Palley, The Brooklyn Skyline November, 26, 2002

 

"Marano's work is often concerned with hidden spaces and unfinished thoughts. She creates kinetic motion in her pieces through symbols, gazes and arows, and tracks, pulling the audience into the heart of the mystery using a slight-of-hand that can only be called magical." 

-Aaron Beebe, Material World,  2013

 

" THUNDERBOLT " ( in progress)   2014