Study IV Painting

I believe that civil discourse can be engaged with through public art and am currently running a kickstarter campaign for a community painting project that raised 75% in the first 48 hours. Check it out: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1973271377/murals-across-america-flint I am interested in painting not only because of its versatility as a medium but also because of its rich historical repository of images and ideas. By tracing the history of the figure in art I have learned and understood better the history of political events, shifts in spiritual beliefs and the tides of intellectual thought. Over the years of working with the body in drawing and painting, investigating the opportunities and revelations that arise, I have begun to understand myself and my place in society as a female, immigrant and artist. My current paintings explore seemingly anachronistic means of representation to depict historically significant events in the present, especially in relation to the depiction of the figure. I have been interested in the global wave of civil unrest as represented by TV and journalistic news media for some time. However, it was only when I saw an image of a 19th century looking barricade in the center of Kiev that I decided to go to the country of my birth and investigate the Ukrainian situation for myself. Thus, I spent a week on the barricades on Maidan, the square where the whole unfortunate crisis started. I happened to arrive at the right time in late January 2014, it happened to be the tipping point between two months of peaceful protests and the violent clashes that followed. Events have unfolded rapidly since my visit and my key sources of information transformed from firsthand experience to social media posts and discussions, live news media coverage and talk shows attempting to analyze the events. My latest work was created in response to my personal experience of the protests in Kiev, engaging with the protesters and subsequent observations of the unraveling of Ukraine’s modern political history as seen from abroad. I am interested in the potential role that painting can play in interpretation and documentation of historical events. At the same time, I am investigating the possibilities of history painting in contemporary society, mainly its relationship to the impossibility of objectivity.