4 Artists

Aisling Hamrogue’s current body of work is comprised of paintings that integrate horror and feminist theories. The appropriation of horror imagery allows her to reconstruct her experience of patriarchal violence into an established genre of representation that is committed to the fetishization and destruction of women. Her painting style is drawn from book cover illustrations and film poster design from the 1980’s. This style underlines the themes of narrative and fiction explored in the work. Drawing from both personal experience and mainstream imagery, these paintings examine the relationship between our private selves and our public representation. By reclaiming these pop cultural subjects, Hamrogue uncovers the hidden power dynamics underlying our society.

Anna Kenneally’s quixotic figures are sequestered at the fringes of society. Evoking a Victorian Gothic melancholy, they radiate the aesthetics of darkness as they navigate uncharted surroundings like vagrants picking over decimated landscapes. Kenneally’s neo-romanticism favours subversive poses amongst erratic brushwork in order to highlight a disconnect and a warped relationship with the landscape. Ravaged by nature and engulfed by unruly forms, her characters reinstate the focus on their motivations, appearances of the self, and their clumsy attempts at reconnection.

Lizzy Lunday’s paintings portray intimacy, both romanticized and at odds with itself. Working with imagery taken from media and her daily life, she paints figures with varying degrees of rendering and line work, situated in dream-like environments. The situations she creates between subjects present a tension between idealized representations of intimacy and its lived complications. Lunday’s paintings embody a duality; her figures can be viewed as comforted or uncomfortable, real or imagined—with reaching hands that can be read as tender or territorial.