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.
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STATEMENT OF WORK
I make paintings about countercultural health and leisure practices. I am delighted by the unconventional ways folks have sought personal liberation through activities such as mud bathing, sunbathing, and nudism—practices that my home region of Southern California, in particular, has attracted. These personal rituals are the primary subjects of my paintings.
My paintings begin with a stain: the serendipity of the bleed is a nod to feminist lineages in art history and laissez-faire attitudes of societal drop-outs. I then paint figures indulging in activities that nurture their rest, pleasure, health, and well-being. I combine the hot, earthy orange of the deserts and the toothpaste green of swimming pools—sites that are rich in leisure history.
As part of my process, I participate in leisure spaces where the body is on display such as community pools, hot tubs and nude beaches to gather real-life experience. Exposure of the body is a constant consideration in my figurative paintings: what parts of the body I show, and the degree of legibility in each work in order to disrupt objectification and regain control.
Making paintings of the body at rest is a powerful gesture and has ties to art history (the reclining nude, for example) that I work to do with a revisionist, contemporary lens.