STATEMENT OF WORK

Mona Welch (b. 1995) is from and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BA from UCLA’s Department of Art in 2019, and is currently an MFA candidate in UC Irvine’s Department of Art (expected 2024). 

The image, or that which appears representational, arrives latently. The motif that lands is the residual effect of the paintings, seemingly inconsequential to their inception. The character of the work however is still of principal concern as this statement above proves nothing of their look. But it is argue for a body of work. Although each discrete object, painting or drawing, is brought up independent of its neighbors, peripheral vision of what came before infiltrates each surface. In this way, repetition of mark, seriality within and between each painting and drawing, quiets authorship and positions the formal as secondary. The physical is not principally grounded in viewership, but in the haptic, at times frenetic, pulsation and sound marking site as its physical parameters. It is this problem that has presented a sort of blindness to the work in their conception: in the lap-sized drawings, the elongation of the activity of the compulsive mark-making and in the large paintings, the loss of anchor between figure and ground when walking back and forth to find some false sense of distance and legibility. Still, with sparse use of paint, time in equal measure to the directness and immediacy of the hand evokes the intangible. But with the absence of visual climax, the intangible, that which avoids nominalization, is not elided or distilled as ephemeral, but instead dually contingent on and concretized by memory of its antecedents.