Quin Monroe: capstone

Abstract

The artist's statement: As It Settles. In the marrow of memory, I build and unbuild a house. The house is a mirror. The mirror reflects a body. The body is a message. The message speaks in the spaces between body and house. The painting arrives in the investigation of the spaces between. — In this body of work the figure emerges and dissolves - sometimes a silhouette, other times a portrait. I use oil paint to explore the tension between memory and place, longing and resistance - woven into fields of pattern and color. My paintings hold onto the uneasy edges of self and unpolished memories, dirtied and weathered in their reflections. Instead, memory becomes patchwork: pieces stitched together, other parts missing, some replaced with stand-ins that the mind offers in an attempt to complete the memory- or image. Color finds itself in these paintings quickly. Sometimes methodical, others on whim. Oftentimes, oranges find a way to seep into the paintings and saturate these spaces. Its place as a foundational color in the body of paintings mirrors the foundation of its symbolism in my memory of home. It has threaded itself through my life with the Leukemia diagnosis of my two brothers. In my paintings, orange is both ground and ghost - an atmosphere that clings to the figures, burdening the narratives they carry. The figures I paint are placeholders for what cannot be fully recovered: they gesture toward what was lost, what was never known, and what quietly survived. They exist between absence and presence, between childhood and adulthood, where the work of forgiveness begins. I am not reconstructing the past but rather sifting through its remains.