THE ARTISTS

BF: I am from Cleveland, Ohio, where I studied my BFA at the Institute of Art, before moving to Kansas City, Missouri. My work is an open self-examination – a little bit like the ‘Operation’ game – that explores different parts of my interiority. I’m interested in how we move between childhood subjects; tapping into my generation’s particular nostalgia for youth. There has been a dark shift during my lifetime with the development of technology. Happiness changed from being something you experienced to something you consumed. The images we consume tell us how to be, what to wear, how to talk. I’m interested in that – in being my age and growing up during this change. What kind of girl am I today? What does that mean? When I was younger, I engaged with images, pictures, noises, colour, books, and television in a way that made being an artist more exciting and robust. Alongside this darkness, there’s humour to my work. Some of the images are from popular culture, like Tom and Jerry. My work draws on the energy of the show, capturing the kind of frenetic humour that erupts when someone gets knocked on the head. I’m also interested in expressing real life emotion and pain through animals. I am particular about why I choose them, but they exist only in the context of my work; I don’t know what they eat or what their lifestyle is. By combining depictions of animals with cartoons, I want to create whirlwinds in my work. I want to see what type of being emerges out of that whirlwind. 

HQ: I was born in Mexico City. I was raised in a Catholic family in Mexico City. My studio practice is in Mexico City. All my life has been in Mexico City. I worked in advertising for twelve years before quitting to paint. Initially, I was frustrated from so many years of not making art, or rather, making art for someone else. My early paintings depict distorted bodies. They were like tumours coming out of me: I had to investigate my dark side. These works were a catharsis for me. I am self-taught, and my work was initially detailed and realistic. It was important to me to know how to paint a hand, an eye, a human body, for artistic validation. Now I know that I can do that, I want to go somewhere else. I don’t want to paint beautiful bodies in a realistic way all my life. It’s boring. I am experimenting with new ways of painting. I want to explore and somehow to know myself through the canvas and through what I’m painting. At school you are taught that the sky is blue, and the grass is green, and the sun is yellow, and the clouds are white; But what happens if you put them in a different order? I am searching for freedom: in myself and in my painting.

AI: I have been painting for fifteen years. I worked as a mural painter, alongside studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Following this, I travelled and set up my own studio practice. There is a continuous interchange between my studio practice and mural paintings. My work outside is site specific. I try to find the subject within the history of the architecture by talking to people and hosting workshops. When I was younger, I focussed on the human figure – bringing this to the outside. And when I worked inside, on my studio practice, I brought the architecture and the landscape from outside to my paintings. I like to work in series and each work has an internal story. I’m interested in deep time and the movement of history through time. We are taught that the Ancient World was white but, in reality, cities like Rome and Pompey would be covered in paintings and colour - they looked more like Walt Disney. I feel connected to the fresco painters from this era – their relationship to the outside and the opaque quality of their paint. I am doing something similar, but with modern technologies. I expanded this idea in a body of work for four years, and created an exhibition around Vitruvius’s book, the original treatise on architecture. My work is the opposite of me: it is sharp and meditative while I am chaotic. But it is a way for me to find a sharper perspective. I want to freeze a moment in the stream of reality, to find clarity.