IDENTITY & FRAGMENTATION: PAINTING SERIES

Abstract

It's not often that we get to see the nightstands of strangers or gaze at those intimate objects that live inside the solitude of someone's bedroom. Ornamental items show how we enhance mundane life through aesthetic experiences in an attempt to curate individual identities. As we transit across time and space we tend to gather and treasure symbols that narrate the story of who we are, where we come from and what we value. Once we are familiar enough with these totems, they start to go unnoticed and become a natural part of who we are and how we interact with the world around us. This series of seven paintings glimpses candid moments inside the bedrooms of immigrant and bilingual young women in close friendship to me. Culture and language fragment the way in which we perceive and relate to the objects we encounter, blinding or highlighting the unfamiliar. Two questions continue to challenge my understanding of reality as a shared multicultural experience: How well can we really know someone through the objects they keep in their living spaces? and How does biased familiarity or unfamiliarity fragment the way we interpret and connect with what we see? The elusive nature of quiet events triggers my desire to find meaning in the absurdity of what seems ordinary. Partial abstraction explores the commodification of identity through objects, while figuration emphasizes the potential that items hold to help us resemble one another through silent socio-cultural cues. My goal is to physically translate this void of curiosity and use the mundane to create analogies that blend the boundaries between the individual and collective experience.