"Tell Me About Entanglement" Painting

The eyes are full of a universal language. They are an unconscious interpreter of the soul. I aim to create painted images that dissolve time, distance, difference, alienation and have the capacity to mend, join, comfort, and reconcile. Created through a gendered lens, my work attempts to reveal issues of identity present in contemporary culture while exposing the metamorphosis that occurs in the expansion of self. My most recent oil paintings connect numerous individual images of eyes intertwined with organic nets of lines, and floral imagery. The structure and imagery explore my thinking on the fluidity and unevenness of personal growth and change, and the experience of inner transformation inspired by my recent experience hiking the Inca trail along the Andes Mountains in Peru. Because the eyes are those of myself and other specific women, they also engage questions of gender, identity formation and expectations in contemporary culture. Through the use of eyes as subject matter, I make use of a biological and symbolic language that crosses time and cultures. The process of making my work is also a metaphor for a beginning that spills outs from a central composition to expand organically in an unpredictable yet unabashed way; Contemporary influences include artists Kiki Smith and Georganne Deen, and the themes of human condition, birth and regeneration played out in their work. Creating the clarity of the outer shape emphasizes biomorphic images that are inspired by my imagination. I pay homage to surrealism with the use of biomorphic imagery and reoccurring motifs, these visuals are outlandish and perplexing; meant to jolt the viewer out of their comforting assumptions. Much like Parisian surrealists Eileen Agar and Alice Rahon, I employ fantasy and dream imagery, that serves as a reprieve from the outside world and address the unease that I feel about the world’s uncertainties. In the same ways seen in the surrealist movement, I am exposing my inner mind in anomalous and symbolic ways: uncovering anxieties and treating them analytically through visual means. I am wanting to investigate deeper within and express through paint a way of stripping away all social/cultural constructs of race, nationality, gender, and sexuality. I seek to bridge the gap in those differences and embrace the discomfort of feeling alien inside our fleshy bodies.