Erica Mahinay

Painting and Drawing Constructions

Artist Statement

 

 

             As an emerging artist, it is my ambition to amplify the scope of my work through compelling visual play, extensive dialogue, and examining my relationship to the history of painting.  In my work, I explore the psychological and emotional weight inherent in our construction of “home”.  My painting-constructions utilize the familiarity of the home to explore notions of longing, displacement, inversion, truth, self-deception, and perseverance.  By combining a variety of materials, I am allowed to create a system of clues that create an immediate sense of familiarity, but in a way that is shifted and uncanny.  Dense layers of subtly colored paint and stripped away portions act in conjunction with found objects and painted representations to create visual play between history and invention, dreams and memory, and the past, present, and future.

 

             I am intrigued by the idea that our personal histories exist to us as fabrications created by the intermingling of myth, memory, dreams, and imagination.  Recollected pieces of our lives intermingle, shuffle, and re-congeal in a way that alters our relationship to history, and enables us to function within our world.  The process of forgetting allows us to create fictional histories, displacing us from truth in a way that makes it ultimately inaccessible. 

 

             Approaching painting as fiction is a way for me to link personal history and collective experience.  Themes take on double meanings.  Nostalgia lures the viewer in before breaking down into fragments, revealing the nature of its systematic invention.  Vulnerability approaches strength and perseverance.  Material functions as metaphor as objects take on unexpected materiality.  Absence is reasserted in every attempt to fill in the blanks.  An object exists in the physical present while indicating a memory or dream. A brush stroke can invent or undo illusion.  Painting, as an act of fabrication, can divulge or dismantle truth.

 

             Like a short story, the details in my work become clues into specificity.  Gestures become punctuation; glistening droplets of subtle yellow light indicate nostalgia; a silk chandelier provokes longing, while finely painted details teeter between crisp vivid memories, and inklings of hope.