Reflections.
Artist’s Statement:
Growing up with my dad, a pilot and my mom, a flight attendant, I was shown the value of travel from a young age. Travel has greatly shaped how I interpret memories. This exhibition examines what it would look like to paint a memory. Like a special dress in the back of your closet you never wear but you just can’t get rid of, like a soaked swimsuit hanging out to dry on a hot summer day, like a bow being looped into a perfect knot, like one big glorious curtain full of light waiting to be drawn open. Memories remain one of those truly intangible beauties of life, made tangible again only through our imaginations.
Similar to your one eye squinting, right finger pressing down, the film lever turning, the vision captured, and in the very same instant, it’s gone. A picture that somehow feels even more precious in your hand than when you were standing there right in front of it taking the photo. Paintings, the original photograph, tell this same story.
This exhibition addresses this encapsulating yet fleeting moment. The light on my parents' chandelier flickering, the raindrops like stars on a black umbrella sky, the streetlights going from red to green in the city, the fluorescent color of a pool float swirling, the lines of light bulbs on a carousel spinning, all memories that illuminate the darkness of life before we experience it. These paintings are to reflect on the reflections, my memory as my forever muse.
In my time at Point Loma Nazarene University, I held an exhibition show in Keller Gallery, showcasing a collection of oil paintings, sculptures, and drawings; exploring what it would look like to blur the three.
Wall 1:
my parents chandelier flickering / my dad’s record player spinning
By the time my studies abroad in Florence came to an end, I knew its cobblestone streets like the back of my hand. The people, art, and their beauty struck me in profound ways during my time here. I reminisce most of walking out of my apartment and immediately through the Piazza della Repubblica everyday and seeing the carousel spin in its center. With not only children, but adults. I still cherish the moment I discovered the people in Florence knew how to preserve and still delight in the joy they felt as a child; when the most ordinary things still exhilarate you.
Oil on cut canvas, Needle threaded border / Depiction of two swimsuits on a hang line with screenprint portraits of my grandmother from Florida and my grandmother from New York / Expresses the distance between these distinctly different places from childhood, yet connects them on the same thread line.
Wall 2:
Orlando
New York
Miami
Paris
Florence
Wall 3:
Wall 4:
sewing machine
film negatives
oil on canvas
In this final piece, I took a dress I made out of painter’s unstretched canvas scraps and made the dress come out of the canvas on the wall, no longer confining an illustration to a page. This is my interpretation of how sketches come to life in fashion. How a memory or an inspiration manifests off the page as a three dimensional work that only just prior, had only existed in your mind and on your page.
oil on canvas
still life drawing
