The following review was originally published by Square Cylinder in October 2025.

With a new suite of fourteen color-soaked, rectangular abstractions, Marsha Cottrell challenges assumptions about perspective, visibility, and collaborative analog technologies. These works blur the boundary between painting and printing, courtesy of a digital office printer and soft fibrous paper. 

From a distance, “Untitled (Coral red with blue and green lines)” (2025) looks like a simple block of saturated red, applied to a warm cream background. The floating color echoes the work of Joseph Albers but on closer inspection we notice that the paper is inflected with dots, some resulting from the paper’s pulp, while others read like residual imperfections related to a printing process. And then, in the color field itself, the warm, rust-leaning red is set deeply into the paper, appearing with an ochre-hued beveled edge caused by the ink pressing into the paper, pushing it down and sometimes leaching out to the sides to mark the edge. The top and bottom of the red rectangle includes six thin lines each, alternating between periwinkle blue and khaki green. These fine lines point out the subtle information, so easily overlooked, that makes up our field of vision. Whereas Albers demonstrated how color is relative, Cottrell shows how color is mixed.

This strategy of working with a printer came about when Cottrell was working in the advertising department at Conde Naste, using the equipment when she had free time. As a result, there is a resistance baked into these works against hasty reproducibility, edition sizes and technological purity. Cottrell ran the work through the printer, each time adding a color. Sequences are improvisatory. Color builds up and bleeds through subsequent layers. “Untitled (Bright yellow with grid),” (2025) is a bright lime green overlaid with a cream-colored grid. There is so much color layered upon itself that it appears to have that beveled edge, noted above, where excess pigment runs to the side to mix and accumulate. The resulting images nevertheless remain graphic and slick, particularly at a distance. 

Cottrell is using technology to imitate technology. “Untitled (Dark with vertical lines)” (2025) is one of the most screen-like works. A rectangular blue image appears to be one solid color from a distance, but up close, the blue reveals itself to be composed from various sequences of thin, vertical lines that are light blue, royal blue, deep maroon, lime green, and black, recalling the digital CMYK palette that now composes all printed output. Beneath these lines is another underlying pattern of diamonds and circles described by even finer magenta and light-yellow lines that run through our superficial verticals at diagonal angles. There is something domestic about this work; it could hang comfortably in a modestly sized kitchen. But the information it contains is dense, riffing off our digital technologies. 

Two 2022 works stand out. They are black and white and produced with a laser printer. Conceivably an origin story for the more recent work, “Untitled (Concentric)” is a line drawing of four circles, each containing concentric circles that diminish in size. “Untitled (Wavy)” (2021) is composed of similarly weighted, computer-produced parallel lines that result in a smaller, rectangular picture plane on the paper. The wave of the composition appears to have been produced when the artist pulled the paper from the printer, causing the printing mechanism to shift. Such physical suggestions appear throughout the show, thus elevating the effect from incidental to intentional. An additional, smaller rectangle in the top middle of the image is repeated in exactly the same spot in “Untitled (Concentric).”

In our obsession with labor and technology, prospectors and idealists have flocked to Northern California to garner wealth and power, proffering visions for a better automated future, and in so doing dividing popular opinion. One side suggests technology might, like religion, reduce human suffering and material cost. 

The other side insists that technology will reduce human agency, civil liberties, political discourse, social collaboration, and possibly draw human history to the brink of destruction. One iteration of this debate is tied to futuristic robots, but the argument’s root goes as far back as ancient Greece, when Aristotle suggested that techne (craft/technology) could imitate and surpass nature, while Plato’s world is an intrinsically perfect system. Many have pointed out that this binary is artificial because nature and technology are inherently intwined. Yet it’s rare to find artistic practices that openly engage, collaborate, and exercise the tension between these poles — not as believer or non-believer, but as an artist making art.