Featured image: Spatial Geographies | Refinery, Marissa Tirone, 2025, mixed media, 12 x 9 in. / 30.48 x 22.86 cm.
Marissa Tirone’s Spatial Geographies | Archive, Spatial Geographies | Ruins, and Spatial Geographies | Shed form a conceptual exploration of space as a constructed and interpretive system.
Marissa Tirone creates conceptual drawings that explore imagined architectural spaces, using abstraction and diagrammatic systems to investigate perception and navigation.
Working in mixed media, Tirone produces diagrammatic compositions that resemble architectural plans, urban grids, and schematic drawings without adhering to functional mapping. Instead, these works propose speculative environments, fragments of an imagined city, where navigation is guided not by logic or utility, but by perception and intuition. Through precision, restraint, and abstraction, Tirone reframes spatial representation as an open-ended experience.
Spatial Geographies | Archive, Marissa Tirone, 2025, mixed media, 12 x 9 in. / 30.48 x 22.86 cm.
In Spatial Geographies | Archive, Tirone constructs a dense, centralized network of lines, grids, and geometric forms that suggest an accumulation of spatial data. The composition radiates outward from a compact core, where squares, circles, and intersecting axes create a layered system of relationships. Subtle color accents, muted reds, beiges, and grays, punctuate the otherwise restrained palette, acting as markers within the visual field. The work evokes the idea of an archive not as a static repository, but as an active, living structure where information is continuously reorganized. The viewer is invited to trace pathways through the composition, encountering moments of order and disruption that resist a fixed reading.
Spatial Geographies | Ruins, Marissa Tirone, 2025, mixed media, 12 x 9 in. / 30.48 x 22.86 cm.
Spatial Geographies | Ruins introduces a more linear and fragmented arrangement, where horizontal and vertical elements stretch across the page in a looser configuration. The composition feels partially deconstructed, as if sections of a once-coherent system have been removed or eroded. Blocks of tonal shading and measured lines suggest architectural remnants, while the presence of open space reinforces a sense of absence. The title positions the work within a temporal framework, implying decay and transformation. Rather than depicting literal ruins, Tirone abstracts the idea of structural memory, how spaces persist through traces, alignments, and residual forms.
Spatial Geographies | Shed, Marissa Tirone, 2025, mixed media, 12 x 9 in. / 30.48 x 22.86 cm.
In Spatial Geographies | Shed, Tirone further disperses her visual language, allowing individual elements to exist with greater autonomy across the surface. Small, repeated marks and linear sequences create a rhythm that feels both systematic and tentative. The composition suggests a site in the process of formation or reduction, something being built, dismantled, or reconfigured. The sparse distribution of forms emphasizes the surrounding negative space, making absence as significant as presence. The title “Shed” introduces a dual reading: a physical structure and an act of release or removal, reinforcing the work’s engagement with transition and transformation within spatial systems.
Across the Spatial Geographies series, Marissa Tirone redefines the conventions of mapping and architectural drawing. Her works do not describe spaces; they propose them. By fragmenting structure and removing functional clarity, she creates environments that must be navigated intuitively rather than logically. These drawings position space as relational, fluid, and contingent, an evolving system shaped as much by perception as by form. Together, Archive, Ruins, and Shed articulate a broader investigation into how we construct, remember, and move through imagined environments.
Spatial Geographies | Tannery, Marissa Tirone, 2025, mixed media, 12 x 9 in. / 30.48 x 22.86 cm.