Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
To apply to the Registry, click here. Join our mailing list here to receive our open call announcement and other programming updates. For any further questions about the Registry, please contact us at registry@whitecolumns.org.
STATEMENT OF WORK
Artist Statement
I am a painter. My work engages the history of traditional figurative painting and styles of contemporary fashion advertising to generate familiar but incongruous paintings. The figures in my paintings are sourced from fashion imagery, art historical tropes and personal memory and invention. I carry a collection of images in my mind, wanted and unwanted. In reaction, I collage and décollage images to conflate the personal and commercial. The painting process is quick and immediate. Paint is applied, but then second guessed and scraped away. The anxiety of constant revision is at the center of my work. Influenced by the random snapshot, celebrity obsession, plastic surgery, and fashion, I remove figures from their original, often clichéd context, and paint them into more personal, darker, dreamier realms. I use paint in service to imagery but also allow it to assert itself as its own material subject. Using painterly contradictions of strength and vulnerability, attraction and repulsion, I work to paint figures that are awkward but known. The paintings suggest states of psychic disintegration and the space between desire and disappointment. In a reconciliation between color and mark, limbs distort, paint melts into skin, and glances confront in discord.
- Theresa Pfarr 2023