Parallel Realities

Parallel realities are all around us. My work invites its viewer into vignettes where conflicting concepts meet. Chisme, Spanish for gossip, sits aside intellectual thought. An enigmatic owl is juxtaposed to ordinary counterparts, crows. A well-behaved boy toils with being perceived as bad. The importance of family dwarfs vestiges of a self-driven life. A female figure reclines in contemplation of two places. 

My series, Parallel Realities, is a personal reflection on dualities within me and around me, in response to my relocation from southern California back to my home state of New Mexico. At the beginning of my move, I was traveling back and forth, tying up loose ends in my former community and establishing a home life in my new one. I thought about how wonderful and vastly different my life was in the two different places. I felt caught between two parallel realities. Then, I started looking for the interplay of more conflicting ideas, and I set out to create works highlighting some of them.

Coming ‘home’ has allowed me perspective and contemplation that narrates my art. The beauty of New Mexican culture has provided ample flare in subject manner including hot air balloons (near and dear, as my grandfather was an original Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta balloonist), wildlife and botanicals, traditions and social interactions, and my own lineage.

I utilize acrylic paints with mixed media accents including powder pigments, acrylic ink, and pastels to create intrigue, texture, and drama in my paintings. Sometimes the concepts I explore demand large-scale displays on canvas, and other times they are whispered as “hidden” elements tucked into the vignettes.

My hope is that my narrative series Parallel Realities sparks contemplation of paradoxes that exist within the viewer’s own experience of reality.