Featured in the Aorta Magazine blog
Interview about my work with Art Larking
Meanwhile. . .
My paintings draw on characters and stories from literature, pop culture, mythology, natural history, and personal narrative to create new stories, worlds and meaning. Old familiar characters meet and new ones are created as stories are reworked and continued. There are no new stories, just the old ones retold. Through storytelling, we create, reflect, and change our own narratives.
In my most recent body of work I have been exploring monsters, women, and demons. In this work, the monsters are not the elder god who waits sleeping, not the terrifying thing in the dark, but the heroes. Their bodies reflect their enormous needs, wants, desires, and experiences. They exist where mortality and physical suffering meet magic and possibility. These monsters are a connection to the most beautiful parts of stories, and the most beautiful parts of ourselves – those shaped by the experience of living through the most horrible and wonderful of times.
In this world the monsters are heroic hags who meet shining carnivorous sea monsters and fish-headed women who carry outer space in their heads. The forever tragic and beautiful Ophelia, doubly blinded by death and love, doubles herself into a vengeful tooth-eyed sea monster rising from the water babbling the pain of a migraine aura. Bearded ladies spend time with a femme demon covered in brightly made-up eyes and lipsticked lips. There are banshees hilarious with their serious amounts of hair and too many eyes (that’s how they see inside and outside of you, and can predict your death), hedgewitches who know all the spells for finding and losing love and foot fungus, and blonde monsters laughing and quoting Dorothy Parker from the pages in the water.
Alexis Amann
San Francisco
September 2011
<3
Interview about my work with Art Larking
Meanwhile. . .
My paintings draw on characters and stories from literature, pop culture, mythology, natural history, and personal narrative to create new stories, worlds and meaning. Old familiar characters meet and new ones are created as stories are reworked and continued. There are no new stories, just the old ones retold. Through storytelling, we create, reflect, and change our own narratives.
In my most recent body of work I have been exploring monsters, women, and demons. In this work, the monsters are not the elder god who waits sleeping, not the terrifying thing in the dark, but the heroes. Their bodies reflect their enormous needs, wants, desires, and experiences. They exist where mortality and physical suffering meet magic and possibility. These monsters are a connection to the most beautiful parts of stories, and the most beautiful parts of ourselves – those shaped by the experience of living through the most horrible and wonderful of times.
In this world the monsters are heroic hags who meet shining carnivorous sea monsters and fish-headed women who carry outer space in their heads. The forever tragic and beautiful Ophelia, doubly blinded by death and love, doubles herself into a vengeful tooth-eyed sea monster rising from the water babbling the pain of a migraine aura. Bearded ladies spend time with a femme demon covered in brightly made-up eyes and lipsticked lips. There are banshees hilarious with their serious amounts of hair and too many eyes (that’s how they see inside and outside of you, and can predict your death), hedgewitches who know all the spells for finding and losing love and foot fungus, and blonde monsters laughing and quoting Dorothy Parker from the pages in the water.
Alexis Amann
San Francisco
September 2011
<3
