Bio
Rebecca lives and works in Centralia, Washington. Her art practice is rooted in the question of balance and the tension between too much and not enough. Rebecca is interested in how these ideas are reflected in cultural and personal relationships to the body, color, and line. She explores these themes through painting, drawing, and installation work.
With a background theatrical scenic painting and set design, Rebecca gravitates toward large surfaces, thin glazes, and deep, layered color. How can a surface, a painting, address itself to the body? Moving beyond the canvas and into the gallery space also allows her to pull from her theatre background and push at these questions further with her installation work. She juxtaposes these practices with fine, controlled, almost absurd drawings that highlight bodily labor over time. Ultimately looking for the limits of excess and the restraint.
Rebecca recently graduated from Montana State University with a Master of Fine Arts where she taught beginning drawing. She also had the opportunity to show her work around Bozeman and Montana during the program.
Artist Statement
I am interested in the conversation between austerity and excess. What do control and restraint have to offer us? What about indulgence? And extravagance? We navigate this relationship daily in our clothing, our food, our purchases, in the way we manage our emotions and our bodies. In many ways, these decisions between pleasure and reason turn into moral choices. Indictments even. If I have restrained my own desires, am I ‘good’? If I have allowed myself a pleasure, have I failed?
In my work, I explore how this dialogue is manifested in my relationship to color, labor, and the body. Much of my work is a product of a strictly defined course of action. I design and execute tasks that require a kind of mechanization of the body. They are simple but prone to evidence of imperfection or lack of control. I look for the places the will or presence of the body, lumbering bear that it is, appears.
I am equally intrigued by products of abandon. In my painting practice, I work without a plan or design. Instead, giving instinct and first impulses a place to go. Color and line give me a language to express the tension I feel between the reasoned control of the mind and the expansive sensation of the body.
Ultimately, my work is an attempt at fleshing out this spectrum.
This pile.
Where can I live in it? And where does it live in me?
