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-Life or death?
Moments of conflict.
Moments of tension.
That's really the fullest expression of a being.
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The space between two figures in conflict
can be the most intimate.
Those animals are being the most themselves,
and through that,
they reflect the human condition.
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My work has to do with swarms of beings, groups, masses,
feeding frenzies, murmurations,
anything where bodies become like a repeated pattern
that turns into a landscape of figures.
I work really large scale.
I think it's the most comfortable
that I am with paintings that are sort of bigger than my body,
wider than my wingspan, taller than my height.
I want you to feel kind of the scale of my own body
and really the scale of the marks.
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All of this work that I'm making takes place on the same island,
and it's an island of my own creation.
So on my island, only males of different species have survived.
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Some apocalyptic event has happened.
Or maybe it's a social experiment.
It's just males of different species.
There were men. There were monkeys.
There were different kinds of mammals.
There are birds. There are all kinds of insects.
There's some marine life.
But at this point, the men have all died off.
I've kind of killed them off.
They have nothing left to contribute.
They kind of died first.
Monkeys died next.
And I'm kind of working my way through mammals into birds
and then kind of looking at insects,
and they're kind of feeding off of each other right now.
And they're snakes, too. The snakes are doing okay.
One of my favorite paintings is of lightning bugs.
It's called "Nocturnal Emissions",
which is my own little private joke.
I'm, you know, often here alone in the studio,
just trying to crack myself up.
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If you know anything about lightning bugs,
they glow, they blink,
they kind of pulse like a very fluorescent green.
Fluorescent yellow.
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The males pulse in, like, a seductive pattern
to kind of communicate to the females.
And the females are like,
"Okay, you're flying around, I get you.
That's cool. I'm over here.
I'm just gonna stay here and like, um,
I'll pulse back if I'm interested."
So of course, in my firefly paintings,
those are all just the males
and they're just, like, pulsing infinitely.
And they have no females to attract.
And so they're just gonna, like, blink and blink
and blink forever and ever until they essentially die off.
With an island full of just males of different species,
what's going to happen?
Like, how are different roles going to be developed?
Who's going to win?
Who's going to be sort of responsible
for the next stage in the story?
As a woman painter,
I'm just going to watch this unfold
and pull on every thread
that I find through this kind of endless narrative.
[ Indistinct chatter ]
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I hope when people see my work
that they're drawn to the imagery,
drawn to the scale, drawn to color,
drawn to maybe the beauty in the violence of nature
and that that helps them look at
where it overlaps with human behavior.
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I want people to feel like 50% fear, 50% ecstasy.
I want it to be like a seductive dance
that I'm having with the viewer,
that there's some intrigue, some questions,
and for them to think about pattern in the animal kingdom.
Beauty in nature
and what we find so compelling about images of violence
and where that can lead.
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