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A Monstrous Size
Within this series of paintings, the story starts at the Swan Song Motel. The first place a person might flee violence is to a motel. I have. Those borrowed rooms are gateways. They are portals to transformation, fantasy, disappearance, and denial.
I try to paint the moment when leaving an old life behind is possible.
What happens when the motel door closes? She might fall to the motel’s mint-tiled bathroom floor in despair. But as she takes in the motel’s glorious decay, hope might grow from the tip of her skull through her hair, eyes, mouth, tongue, teeth, and nostrils, trickling over her neck, breast, side, and limbs.
She would feel it in her joints, fat, and two hands.
She would start to grow.
Ecstasy and Escape at the Swan Song Motel
Acrylic, acrylic gouache, water soluble oil,
pumice gel on canvas
48 x 60 x 2 inches
2023
Swan Song
Acrylic, acrylic gouache, water soluble oil on
Arches 300 lb. hot-press paper, silver frame
24 x 24 inches (framed)
2023
Fantasy Suite
Acrylic, acrylic gouache
Arches 300 lb. hot-press paper, silver frame
24 x 24 inches (framed)
2023
Vacancy
Acrylic, acrylic gouache
Arches 300 lb. hot-press paper, silver frame
24 x 24 inches (framed)
2023
Make Room
Acrylic, acrylic gouache, water soluble oil on canvas
24 x 36 inches
2023
A poem commissioned for the exhibition:
A Spell For Overthrowing
BY VENESSA M. FUENTES
I am convinced that in any creativity there exists [an] element of revolt.
— Leonor Fini
When the January night sky blinks clear, tossing
moonburn across each branch and rooftop
and storefront, you will know the right time has come
for you to leave small things behind. It starts becoming clear
how they have exhausted the shelter of your peace, outworn their welcome
in your changing body. Without you, these small things—the scout’s sword
the rose’s thorn—will wither and lose their bite by the time you
step foot on the street, towards the endless cornfields
on the edge of town. This is how
your revolt begins and every part of you
stills itself
for creativity, for transfiguration
Now that you can focus on yourself, check into the motel room
Lock and security chain the door. Next, empty your coat pockets of the
beads, crow feather, and hazelnut seed
you’ve collected and kept close
for an altar.
Baby blue beads, a shield of protection
The pink ones bring tenderness to
regenerate and nourish your clarity. But the yellow beads
with their chipped-tooth grins
are hot to the touch, imbued
with pearls of colostrum and decidual cells
Strung together and
bookended by black feather and velvet-green seed, shining
in the center of your altar, a beaded bracelet like this
can trace and welcome you back to the
HOW DARE YOU
in yourself. Say it out loud once you find it, feel yourself grow
giant-sized each next time you sing.
Sing and overthrow wandering armies of peepholes
insults and secret cheat codes. Sing and let your brokenness surprise you as it
knits you new bones, brighter blood
No more locks, goodbye chains
You are no longer the little you
the separate you
the small you
the doormat you
You are monstrous
You move galactical
Bad Art
Until recently, feminine, therapeutic, and narrative painting was considered decorative, unserious, and lowbrow. Bad art. But aren't all figure painters playing with dolls? Aren't all interior paintings doll houses?
Each painting within Ecstasy and Escape started by examining found objects: toys, trinkets, and furniture. I want viewers of this exhibition to feel as if they are playing in an imagined sanctuary I've built for them. The installation offers a doorway into greater immersion within my imagined land. When hung with the collection of objects, I hope the artwork jolts the viewer back and forth between child and adult — between “life-size” and “giant size,” between play and power, hope and loss.
“I am not myself you see, it is hard to be oneself when you are so many different sizes in a day.”
— Lewis Carroll, Alice In Wonderland
You Will Know the Right Time has
Come for you to Leave Small Things Behind
Acrylic, acrylic gouache, on Arches 150 lb,
hot-press paper
56 x 46 inches
2023
Tumbled, Tumbled, Stretched
Acrylic, acrylic gouache, water soluble oil
on maple cradled panel
30 x 72 x 1.75 inches
2023
Let Me Pull Myself Out of These Waters
Acrylic, acrylic gouache, water soluble oil
on canvas
48 x 36 x 2 inches
2023
I am stretched
“Let me pull myself out of these waters. But they heap themselves on me; they sweep me between their great shoulders; I am turned; I am tumbled; I am stretched among these long lights, these long waves, these endless paths, with people pursuing, pursuing.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
“The figure’s wound is her own, but as we witness it, we realize traces of her wound are in me and
in you.”
— Bracha L. Ettinger
Protect My Belly, Loins, and Genitals,
Paunch and the Vital Parts of My Heart
Acrylic, acrylic gouache, water soluble oil on
Arches 300 lb. hot-press paper, framed, beads and silver chain
21 x 7.5 inches
2023
Let Your Brokenness Surprise You As It Knits
You New Bones, Brighter Blood
Acrylic, acrylic gouache, water soluble oil
on Arches 150 lb. hot-press paper, framed
38 x 30 inches
2023
Ecstasy & Escape
There is no linear path to healing. For many survivors of violence, every day will continue to offer a battle against a tiny army of memories and fears. Sometimes, those battles are small. Sometimes, they are epic. Even long after the traumatic moment has passed, the very idea of safety itself is the ultimate fantasy.
Many of us who have experienced violence relive our past traumas over and over again. Daniela Schiller, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, has found that trauma memories light up an entirely different part of the brain from other sad memories. Traumatic memories within brain scans illuminate the same area as introspection and daydreaming. To me, the fact that traumatic experience and daydreaming process similarly makes complete sense.
I believe that once you experience extreme violence, you no longer live in the present reality. My paintings hold space for the viewer to transport terrible memories into fantasy. The dreamland offers a place to imagine what true bodily autonomy could be.
“The inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality is a hallmark of psychosis but I think healthy people trick themselves into believing daydreams all the time. “
— Keziah Weir
“Be then a most protective breastplate for my limbs and innards”
Deliver all the Limbs of Me a Moral, with your Protective Shield Guarding Every Member
Acrylic, acrylic gouache, on Arches 150 lb.
hot-press paper, antique stained glass window frame from Catholic church in Waupun, Wisconsin
96 x 30 inches
2023
Deliver Me
I am painting over toxic patriarchal roots of the catholicism I grew up within. In an era where reality feels distant and distorted daily, I crave a secular (yet mystical) and feminist (yet intersectional) future that is equitable and just. There are so many battles before us right now. What are we fighting for? What futures are we writing and visualizing with the art in our time? What will we keep? What will we discard from our past?
The final stage in the cycle of Ecstasy and Escape finds giants’ bodies broken apart into abstracted, floating parts. When the bodies fall into an arrangement of limbs, flowers, symbols, and armor, they become memorials to the transition of a doormat to a goddess. In a tiny, puny moment, the fantasy feels massive. It is galactic. It feels real.
“Deliver my skull, hair-covered head, eyes, Mouth, tongue, teeth, and nostrils, neck, breast, side and limbs, joints, fat, and two hands...
Be a helmet of safety to my head, to my crown covered with hair, to my forehead, eyes and triform brain, to snout, lip, face, and temply, to my chin, beard, eyebrows, ears, chaps, cheeks, septum, nostrils, pupils, irises, eyelids, and the like, to gums, breath, jaws, gullet, to my teeth, tongue, mouth, uvula, throat, larynx and epiglottis, cervix, to the core of my head and gristle, and to my neck may there be merciful protection. Be then a most protective breastplate for my limbs and innards, so that you drive back from me the unseen nails of the shafts that foul fiends fashion. Protect, with your powerful breastplate my shoulders with their shoulderblades and arms, protect my elbows, cups of the hand and hands, fists, palms, fingers with their nails. Protect my spine and ribs with their joints, back, ridge, and sinews with their bones; protect my skin and blood with kidneys, the area of the buttocks, nates with thighs. Protect my hams, calves, femurs, houghs and knees with knee-joints; protect my ankles with sins and heels, shanks, feet with their soles. Protect my toes growing together, with the tips of the toes and twice five nails; protect my breast, collarbone and small breast, nipples, stomach, and navel. Protect my belly, loins, and genitals, paunch and the vital parts of my heart; protect my three -cornered liver and groin, pouch, kidneys, intestine with its fold. Protect my tonsils, chest with lungs, veins, entrails, bile with its eruption, protect my flesh, loins with marrow, and spleen with twisting intestines. Protect my bladder, fat, and all the rows beyond number of connecting parts; protect my hair and the remaining members which I have perhaps omitted. Protect the whole of me with my five senses, together with the ten created orifices, so that from soles of feet to crown of head I shall not sicken in any organ inside or out. In case the life should be forced from my body by plague, fever, weakness or pain, until I grow old. So that leaving the flesh I may escape the depths, and be able to fly to the heights.
— LORICA OF GILDAS, 6TH CENTURY
