Liminality
Liminality: moments in the transition of time that border on the threshold of our reality. This concept compares to the feeling of uncanny: something strange and mysterious, usually in an unsettling way. These ideas are based on feelings, experiences, and the emotional responses they evoke; they locate the strangeness in the ordinary.
I aim to focus on the separation between reality and how one puts themselves in it. During and after the lockdowns of the coronavirus, I felt disconnected from my surroundings as if I entered a different reality: places didn't look the same and I didn't feel the same, as if I was looking through someone else's eyes. I started to take landscape pictures every time I felt a wave of disconnection and paint them the way they felt to me. I paint these scenes in gouache; medium reflected my ideas of an in-between reality: not really acrylic or watercolor, but something in the middle. For more personal pieces, I paint them with oil focusing on desaturated colors and texture. While these scenes are more specific to me, they are still everyday places my audience could relate to. I focused on man-made structures and landscapes because I could imagine myself in that place and wanted my audience to relate to the location at a glance before the unsettling feelings crept in.
Stranger in the tub 2022 18 x 24 Oil on panel
The fan 2023 12 x 24 Oil and acrylic on canvas
Enigma 2022 8.5 x 11 Gouache on paper
Two lurkers 2024 11 x 17 Gouache on paper
Bad Day! in Wyoming 2024 9 x 7 colored pencil on paper
Version 1 of In pursuit 2022 8.5 x 11 Gouache on paper
In pursuit 2023 17 x 11 Gouache on paper
Diet of worms 2024 17 x 25.25 Oil on panel
Moving.....on 2024 13.25 x 13.25 oil on panel
Wrong turn 2024 21.5 x 14 Oil on panel
Doppelganger
The doppelganger series is a combination of portraits, sized 28 x 22 inches, and landscapes, sized 28 x 30 inches, that branch off of liminality.
When I moved to Richmond, I would encounter my own Doppelganger from time to time; unknown to me if it was another person or a hallucination. But, similar to the liminal environment, it felt real and filled me with panic and dread. In this series, I focused on the first doppelganger: the mirror, and how it changed how I saw myself in Richmond and how uninviting and unwelcoming it felt; as if I was in a different reality, and the only thing drawing me in was my curiosity. I wanted to further connect with the viewer by capturing the everyday locations of local Richmonders because they often know that feeling without even thinking about it. Each place feels stuck in time and grounded in a reality that could be our own, but something just seems………off.
After experiencing and playing Garage Heathens’ “Who’s Lila?”, in 2022, I was instantly hooked on the genre and style of horror games I was finding at the time, such as Shaun Aitcheson and Laurie Michel-Hutteaus’ “A Date in the Park,” 2014, and Mason Smiths’ “Faith: The Unholy Trinity,” 2022. I shifted from analog horror and moved more into individual storytelling and personal experiences found in these bit-styled games. I loved how each one utilized showing portraits alongside landscapes throughout gameplay, giving the player more understanding of how a character reacts in real-time, something I wanted to utilize in my paintings and experiences.
Like Heathen, I utilize the two-tone style to detail the world around me and allow the mystery to lurk; allowing each individual to fill in gaps of what horrors remain. Building off of liminality, seeing my doppelganger did not feel in the same realm of real reality, so I decided to use a digital style to communicate the feeling. I focused this series specifically on painting because I didn't want it to be replicated in forms of printmaking but I wanted them to have texture and tactility to them; to exist only as paintings. I wanted them each to have a unique one-of-a-kind feeling even if it was ‘repeated’ over and over like in the portraits.
