Artist Statement

Gods + Aliens is an exhibit of small selections from two bodies of work which explore portraiture in relation to characters of celestial origin. The two mythical portrait paintings in this exhibit, which are part of a larger body of work, attempt an investigation of  the intersection of the mythical and the divine with the mundane, by re-creating people I know as deities of Greco-Roman origin, while simultaneously attempting a disruption of the racist and gendered narratives that can plague the spiritual and the mythical. Each work is not meant to be prescriptive in terms of its interpretation but is meant to be open to viewer perspectives and to notions of each divine figure’s complexity and human-likeness. The models within these works are not professional models—they are friends and acquaintances who have been asked to help reimagine these characters, playacting the role of these figures, while ensuring the retention of their own individuality and modernity. While these paintings explore the ability of portrait painting to address the divine in a way that is cognizant of the politics embedded in all depictions of human beings, my other paintings, the Space Queen series, are a slightly more personal and intimate reflection on portraiture. The Space Queen series, inspired by my own isolating and traumatic pregnancy and post-partum experience, including insomnia and near-psychosis, consists of narrative self-portrait paintings that depict the daydreamed character Space Queen as a kind of mascot for ruminations on daydreaming, loneliness, feminine oppression, and the strange metacognitive journeys that occur within the act of daydreaming. Space Queen, like the Greco-Roman gods, is a celestial being, though she is imagined as an extra-terrestrial, or perhaps a genetically modified neo-human—or even a cyborg creation—either in a distant future or a distant past. She is cloned from her original self, a consciousness immortally transferred between continually produced bodies. Unable to reproduce sexually, since it serves no purpose for her immortal life, she has no nipples—a feature possibly in reaction to my toddler, who was still breastfeeding at the time of this painting’s creation. Her story, like a daydream, is neither fixed nor necessarily coherent. Within these paintings, despite any attempt at detachment from reality, she is beholden to the perceptions and projections of humankind, inspired obviously by my own experience—just as the daydream is always a metacognition of our own lives, a meditation on our desires and limitations, our beliefs and trepidations.

Together Gods + Aliens hopes to encourage viewers to reflect on the power of the modern portrait while considering the way in which the issues of our world effect all depictions of the human being. Furthermore, these paintings aim to provide an opportunity to engage with the portrait in a way that conflicts with current societal conditions around images of the self – specifically, but not limited to, the commodification of the modern portrait. This work, being nearly Hyperreal, and therefore materially difficult and time-consuming to produce, confront these consumerist notions which threaten to dehumanize images of human beings into merely a sales tool. It expands upon the ability of detailed and hyperreal oil paintings to honour the individual while acknowledging the complexity of current social conditions, aiming to elevate the portrait beyond the everyday with the goal of connecting the viewer to reflections on the mythical and the spiritual, and the fantastical reality of our own corporeal form.