"Valentina" Painting

Monique Barnett is a painter based between Australia and Germany. Interested in the representation of the body in, beauty and fame culture. Working principally with fashion and gossip magazines. Removing these images from their context seeking to find the flux in- between two and three dimensions and their contextual meanings. Barnett received her BFA in 2009 from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in New Zealand.

Barnetts creative process physically recreates this dimensional transformation to explore the concept of fame, immortality and infinity. It begins by cutting out figures from fashion and gossip magazines, with no curatorial process of who to cut out and who to leave behind. These cut outs are then pined and strung in a small three walled box, like a stage set, the figures are
transformed back into three-dimensional space. I then use my camera to take photos of this constructed diorama, projecting them back to two-dimensions. These photographs, a record of this transformation, is where the painting process begins. This process causes abstract mutations of the depicted figures and space. In the painting the figure becomes homogeneous, no longer identifiable cultural star, pop singer or model just well known bodies and faces abstracted into a space beyond the ordinary.