Film Set, Acrylic on Canvas, 40x30in, 2020
The future sucks. Thinking about what will happen in a week even brings anxiety. Wanting to learn more about this fear is the subject that my current painting series will focus on, the idea of anxiety behind uncertainty.
The uncertainty of the future is at an all-time high due to the ever-changing, tense situations that include (but are not limited to) the 2020 election, the coronavirus, the fight for equality, etc. My paintings play on the idea of unease about the future by having different elements that incorporate quick animations to jar the viewer or by focusing on dark connotations dealing with death in a playful manner as to seem like the meanings are “sugarcoated”, making the viewer feel conflicted while looking at these visually “cute” artworks. The purpose of these paintings is to represent different forms of anxiety in the viewers by either bringing up the idea of death and what happens after we die or by simply adding different elements to jar the viewer and make them question or be paranoid by what they saw.
Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet inspired the theme of a creepy but cute scene that visually draws from German Expressionism. The reasoning behind the landscape is based on the ideology behind German expressionist film sets. Created after World War One, when foreign films were banned, German directors created films centered around the dark side of the human psyche on a budget. Born out of cheap curiosity, these sets were painted exclusively in black and white. The ominous resulting atmosphere recall the look of old black and white films and German Expressionist films. Projected onto this painting, are two different entities, a black and a white being. These entities quickly run around the scene from the shadows of the landscape, occasionally crossing paths to create a gray.
A sheet ghost, constituted by living flowers, questioning the feeling of death it asks, is one actually happy after death? Martha Bernays, wife of Dr. Sigmund Freud, completes this painting. During the early parts of their marriage, Sigmund mentally abused Martha in order to discourage her from talking to other males and was adamant about “fixing” her to become the “perfect” wife that would treat him equal, if not better, than their own children, even having an affair with her sister later in their lives. For this painting, Martha is framed by poisonous flowers to simulate the toxic relationship she endured. Thin transparent oil paint creates a colorized scene similar to an old movie. Accompanying Martha is Francine Hughes. Francine started a fire, literally, under how the United States justice system handles domestic abuse. Being brutally abused, physically and mentally, and fearing for her and her children’s lives, she set her sleeping husband on fire in their home and escaped. Francine is surrounded by fire to encapsulate how the future possibly felt to her before she killed her abuser. Along besides her, is a ghost, projected on smoke, to possibly show how she felt after or to show her worries. Anyways, these paintings question the idea of death with the viewer. If there is an afterlife, is it really any better? How can we possibly know? Does the future really suck?