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Room at Night (2022)
Oil on stretched canvas, about 5ft x 7ft
The point of departure for this project was an experience of disembodiment I had sitting in my room at midnight last year during a long, slow, and humid summer break after my return home from my first year of in-person college. During this experience, I felt as though the objects in my room, while usually imbued with personal and cultural significance, were simply a conglomerate of molecules buzzing about. I looked down at my hands and felt as though my hands were made of the same meaningless conglomerate of matter as the objects in my room. This feeling of a lack of agency in the world, a result of molecules interacting, of space and time, a result of outside cultural and political forces, and of feeling disconnected from the material world is what spurred a desire to examine more closely this same material world I sometimes feel disconnected from and thus, the idea for this large interior landscape painting of my room at night.
My artistic practice has always been tethered to a close looking of the things around me, and often the objects or spaces that I have spent a lot of time in. By looking closely at the things that surround me in my everyday life, and by re-depicting them, I am asserting my agency over them as well as creating a dialogue between them. For this painting, I was interested in depicting nighttime because its atmosphere is conducive to contemplation and deeper questioning of the real. I wanted to depict my room as how it felt, both strange and familiar, magical and mundane. Additionally, I was interested in light and how in painting it can be a physical matter whereas in life it is purely energy. In the current social world mediated by abstractions and technology, I want the frankness of connecting with my immediate surroundings, of looking closer at the things around me and how these things can impart emotional experiences.