Feature image: Mexico Studio, 2022. Photo: Patricia Robert.
By Linda Marcus
For artist Monica Rezman, the “in between” is not a point of transition but a place of belonging. It’s where her practice lives — in the slip between mediums, cultures, and states of being. “It feels natural,” she says of this undefined space. “It’s my strength.”
Dividing her time between Chicago and Mérida, Mexico, Rezman moves fluidly between two distinct worlds, drawing energy from the friction and harmony of both. When she first arrived in Mérida, the absence of familiar materials prompted an unexpected evolution. “I realized I work best with limitations,” she recalls. “I’m not scared; I’m not afraid of failure. I’m always open to learning new things.” What might have seemed like constraint became the generative condition of her practice.
Rezman’s work occupies a hybrid terrain — painting that behaves like sculpture, sculpture that retains the sensibility of painting. Her recent series begins as acrylic on canvas, but the surfaces are cut apart, reassembled, and stitched back together. Seams, reminiscent of garment construction, interrupt the painted fields, invoking a tactile language of repair and transformation. “Painting is such an intense art form,” she notes. “Bringing stitching into it relieves me — it gives me a kind of space in between.”
The results are dynamic, wall-bound forms that refuse containment. Protruding outward, they seem to shift and unfold, their physicality animated by the rhythm of addition and subtraction. “I like reassembling things,” Rezman says. “I’m always adding, taking away, and seeing where it goes.” The process is both constructive and deconstructive — an act of material thinking that asks what it means to make a painting that is also, insistently, an object.
A parallel inquiry runs through Rezman’s sculptural work, much of it derived from her earlier ‘hair paintings,’ begun more than a decade ago with charcoal on paper. She now adds cardboard armatures, lending structure to forms that remain visually light. The motif of hair — first inspired by watching her mother try on wigs — carries forward a meditation on femininity and self-presentation. “I became fascinated by how women use adornment as a kind of language,” she says.
That curiosity has evolved into a larger ambition: to expand the visual vocabulary of sculpture itself. “I want to make sculptures that feel like a woman made them,” Rezman explains. “Not these large, rusty monuments, but something colorful, something alive. I think of sculpture as painting — I want to bring my paintings into a bigger arena.”
In Rezman’s world, the boundaries between media are not obstacles but openings — permeable thresholds where material, memory, and identity continually recombine. The “in between” is not where she hesitates. It’s where her work begins.
To learn more about Monica Rezman, visit monicarezman.com and connect on Instagram at @monicarezman
Monica Rezman: Between Two Worlds is published in Issue 40. Purchase a copy here.
Linda Marcus is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Drawing on her long history as a TV News journalist and fashion designer, her work in fiber and sculpture touches on issues of memory, identity, and materiality.
Marcus was recently awarded an art residency at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, the Wisconsin Museum of Quilts and Fiber Arts, as well as the Charles Allis Museum and numerous galleries across the country and in art publications. Currently, Marcus is the creative director and co-curator for the Saint Kate Arts Hotel in Milwaukee.