Open gallery
My body of work, “Guts,” explores the organic nature of abstraction and the truth one discovers by working purely through feeling. Inspired by the utopian, visionary ideas and stylistic techniques of my Modernist predecessors, I re-evaluate these ideas to fit a more contemporary culture.
In a society where emotions and insecurities are becoming easier to hide through technology and social media, we are becoming increasingly distant and more afraid to confront our own inner battles. Although technology has brought the globe together in ways that were previously unimaginable, younger generations are becoming incapable of learning how to directly communicate and discuss thoughts and emotions when face-to-face. Social media encourages us to create a persona and hide our biggest insecurities behind cleverly angled selfies. Texting often allows us to avoid intimate conversations through quick and efficient chatspeak. We are hopelessly losing touch with our true selves.
By developing a vocabulary of quirky, visceral shapes in the company of color palettes that have been carefully selected from personal memories, I am confronting my gut feelings and aiming to work through them by giving them a sense of urgency through physicality. I believe that the process behind painting is just as important as the idea that is being conveyed. Therefore each painting undergoes several different physical states as I work through different emotions and feelings that were previously buried inside of me.