Aging, Frailty & Death Painting

Muriel Jaouich lives and works in Montreal. Jaouich showcases the latter stages of a woman's life that address the lack of images in contemporary culture of feminity and aging. Investigating the invisibility of older women and their subjectivities through color and shape, Jaouich destabilizes preconceptions of ugliness and beauty associated with the youthful and elderly. The portraits emphasize the element of transformation and growth through time. In painting the subject's features from a new perspective, the metamorphosis of aging develops as a generative process rather than a degenerative one. Chaotic but unrecognizable, human but otherworldly, the subject of the paintings becomes abstract and expansive as she breaks the boundaries of her form and splinters the viewer's expectations of aging as an unseemly decline.