No More Nostalgia Painting

This is another building from Marin County, however in this case its context rests in connection to a grandiose mythological narrative about patriarchal religion handing over the baton to feminine spirituality. The characters to the left are appropriated out of a Giotto painting, and the feet are those of actress Blake Lively--Hollywood stars as our modern goddesses. This painting took on a life of its own as its meaning during the process of making, but I see the connection between the personal and the universal, and the individual life as an embodiment of universal themes. These paintings create a series entitled The Connectivist’s Dilemma. I portray architectural features of American suburban homes either contained by the Scottish landscape, immersed in mytholocial drama, or as memories.   Home represents a utopian desire for connection and community, but also speaks to middle class consumerism.  The idealization of the familiy and home as a symbol of middle life success plays into my own contradictory feelings of being in a home caring for a young child and handling domestic duties. Additionally, as I paint in attempt to integrate my identity, the houses I portray in my my Edinburgh studio reveal my nostalgic longing for my childhood in California. I investigate the modern migratory individual’s fragmentation, in which one must reconcile  and assimilate different aspects of oneself.    Home is a longstanding theme in my work, but always the exterior, always on the outside looking in. The aim of these paintings is to express home as both real and conceptual, to cultivate my own sense of home, and to invite the audience into a space of belonging and interdependence.