Art

Item Description

"Sparse Cornucopia" is memory foam on panel, silicon, resin, and plastic piece measuring 12"X12".

Artist Statement:

"The foundation of my studio practice is positioned within a vocabulary that draws upon the history and syntax of painting, incorporates physical materials, and sets up systems for allegory and metaphor-- indicating shifts in time, consciousness, and perception.  Painting reveals truth through a process that is inherently deception. Illusion is fruitful territory for trickery and fabrication.  Contradiction has become a language for navigating the familiar.  Concealing and revealing, connecting and reconnecting, displacing and replacing, my process can be related to gossip and oral story telling, creating shape shifting tableaus that intermingle myth, memory, dreams, and imagination.  Themes take on double meaning, as material becomes metaphor.  Glazed, dripped, and slathered paint describes form with vitality and presence, while cast plaster and found objects become skeletal memories or dislocated desires.

     For me, much of my work can read through two central veins, which run parallel and informing one another. The first asks questions about representation.  Each iteration of representation serves as deformity or deception.  Original experience is questioned.  The mold and the cast object become equally inaccurate surrogates for the real.  The whole cannot be seen all at once, and memory serves to further distort. Painting pushes against limitations of memory and translation, indicating an in-between place that struggles to materialize the immaterial.

     The second path takes on traditional tropes of the vanitas, approaching themes of mortality and decay and questioning our earthly presence. In recent work, foodstuffs become absurdly visual, tactile, decadent—sometimes mouth-watering, at points repulsive—concoctions.   In translating the description of an object through multiple mediums, I find a tactile truth, which suggests vulnerability, and engages the viewer on a visceral, emotional and psychological level.  Foodstuffs enter a new context by flipping tangibility and creating inverted narratives or constructed realities that push against notions of pleasure, gluttony, mortality and mystery.  Denial of the familiar opens up space for questioning existence and confronting death.  Silicon, resin, and plaster fruits conjure allusions to the body, but also suggest medical and scientific intervention, preservation, and an obsession with immortality.

     In my work, there is a consistent curiosity about mind’s ability to trigger coping mechanisms. Memory is an agent for erasure and fabrication, making it difficult to separate reality from fiction, past from present, mental degradation from channeling the mystical.  Using the familiar, my work pushes towards the strange, the uncanny, the misplaced, the surreal, approaching aspects of experience that escape logic and definition—a fulcrum at which reality is deciphered through limitations of memory and translation.  My work is often fragmented and seeped with an emotional residue, indicating moments in which our minds and bodies falter—instances of loss, vulnerability, and deception—but also moments offering possibility and invention.

     Containing a need to function in a space that straddles the conscious and the unconscious, the work explores the slippery places in the psyche-- flirtations between sex and death and longing—between the spiritual and the secular, as unearthed forms of visual representation that parallel the trickiness and poetry of daily human experience.  Channeling moments in which our minds and bodies falter, the work suggests instances of loss, vulnerability, and deception."

About the Artist:

Erica Mahinay is a MFA candidate at Cranbrook Academy of Art (2013), and received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2008.  She was recently featured in New American Paintings: No. 99, MFA Annual, 2012, Juried by Alma Ruiz, Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.  Prior to graduate study, she participated in Charlotte Street Foundation’s yearlong Urban Culture Project Studio Residency Program (2009-2010), was awarded an ArtsKC Inspiration Grant, and attended a two-month residency program at Vermont Studio Center.  Her soloexhibition (Re:Describe) was on view at the Cocoon Gallery, Kansas City, MO in March 2011, and was reviewed by Steve Brisendine for Review:  Mid-America’s Visual Arts Publication.  Additionally, her work has been featured at the Paragraph Gallery, H&R Block ArtSpace, Syringe Gallery, and SBG Gallery, Kansas City, MO.

Item Special Note

All proceeds go to the Inner Door Foundation which was created in 2006 to raise public awareness about eating disorders along with promoting education and holistic treatment. For more information, please visit: http://innerdoorcenter.com/index.php/foundation. 

Winning bidder will be responsible for shipping costs. 

Shipping costs are estimated, and include packing materials. Cost for this piece is estimated to be around $45.90.