I am interested in making art that facilitates conversations around freedom, autonomy, futility, and suffering. Growing up in Las Vegas and attending Catholic school, my influences surrounding womanhood were polarizing. Whether it was in Church or on a billboard, representations of women were an overwhelming object of my environment. By appropriating Christian iconography and combining it with the hyper-sexual aesthetics of Las Vegas, I paint images that reflect and further complicate ideologies related to the body, social conditioning, and self-realization. Under the established patriarchy, navigating the boundaries between objectification and subjectivity can be muddy and confusing. I want to expand this conflict between who we are and who we are conditioned to be, and shamelessly transcend these binaries. My position on this has been informed by the writings of feminist philosophers and research about the way art history has dictated representations gender, sexuality, and the intersections between them. It feels empowering to recontextualize iconic representations of women by articulating the performativity of womanhood. I choose to stylize my portraits and figures to play with objectification and the elusiveness of idealized beauty. I combine non-natural color palettes that demand attention, with traditional Baroque techniques, such as diagonal compositions and chiaroscuro, to push and pull sensations of familiarity, history and modernity, and to examine how the objectification of women has pervaded art history and continues today. I want my art to question how we exist in spaces that aren’t designed for us, and to consider the dynamics between agency and environment.

kaitlynwallaceart.com /// @kaitlynxwallace