Originally from Boston, MA, Randi Reiss-McCormack currently lives and works as a professional artist in Baltimore, MD. For the last eight years, she has been the Artist-in-Residence at the St. Francis Neighborhood Center. She obtained her undergraduate degree in painting and printmaking at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), spent a year working in various printmaking and painting studios in Paris and earned her graduate degree at The Maryland Institute College of Art. Reiss-McCormack focuses her art primarily on painting, printmaking and mixed-media works. She is currently interested in the play between experiments in printmaking, textiles and painting and how they inform and influence one another. 

The work in Wonderlust was created over the past three years and veers between the recognizable and the abstract. The imagery is derived from the physicality of the world but is guided by the subconscious. Reiss-McCormack explores how abstraction gives form to things residing in and imprinted on our subconscious. Working in a wide range of media, moving from textile and printmaking to painting and mixed media, the artist uses the constraints of each medium to intercede on one another. The structure of collage allows for play and multiple points-of-view, creating a channel to a subconscious world. The structure for these latest works relies heavily on the imprint of organic shapes and forms derived from nature. Reiss-McCormack finds that her art-making process can be related to moving through the woods – both having the nature of a meandering flow. “I am working to create a language that reveals itself to me in a ritualistic approach to process with constant recombination of material,” states Reiss-McCormack.