I’m in a museum!
MORE DISRUPTION: REPRESENTATIONAL ART IN FLUX
I am so honored right now to be a part of an amazing show curated by John Seed, Aleah Chapin, and Timothy Robert Smith! It runs JUNE 8 – SEPTEMBER 15, 2024. “The show explores representational art that has been “disrupted”—including by abstraction, web-based imagery, and socio-political concerns—in response to contemporary life and its challenges.” - taken from the museums’ website. In the show I have a painting I call E-Harmony. Here is my story of how I came to paint this one:
During the pandemic, when life drastically slowed down for me (other than the chaos of caring for my then 1 and 3 year old) I had the pleasure of getting to know an amazing teen named Bella. She is also an artist and is a pro at creating digital art. She eventually apprenticed in the studio organizing, making paint swatches, preparing surfaces, etc. I always admired her digital art and somehow convinced her to teach me the ins and outs of the app Procreate! For those of you that don’t know, Procreate is creative app for digital art on the iPad. She basically opened up a new world for me in regards to creating imagery to paint! I at some point, the way I do, knew that I “needed” to paint her in an embrace with a robot! For me sometimes the image comes first and this was totally that time. I saw this painting in my mind before I made it.
Usually I’m not big on giving away the meaning of my paintings. I want an open ended dialogue between the viewer and the image. However in this case I’ve got my elevator pitch down (lol in preparation of the big show!) and in short, here it is:
For me, this painting expresses the inevitable marriage between teens and technology.
They live in a world together for better or worse, till death do they part. I grew up in such a different world, where research was done at the library and if the 20ish? channels didn’t have anything to watch (which was most of the time) I went outside. The world of today is different, and these brave resilient teens are navigating in a completely different way. It’s fascinating, terrifying and wonderful all at once.
https://oma-online.org/disruption/