Esmeralda Montes

Artist Statement

My work focuses on the idea of free-formed narratives. I examine my personal history, as it relates to my background, social media platforms, landscape, and film. I am interested in collecting information to fuse and form new contexts. With painting, I can alter states that were once factual to represent an alternative history. The paintings reflect a narrative that have no beginning or end, and must rely on each other in order to inform the future or past series. I often try to paint a subject and work in opposites by eliminating one aspect of a series or painting that could shift and produce various outcomes for a picture.

The figures in my work are informed through social media platforms, where often personas are invented. The figures become physically manipulated with skewed body parts to depict a protagonist or antagonist being; retelling personal experiences that reflect human relationships, procreation, death, absurdity, and isolation. The landscapes depicted in the paintings are temporal. The paintings allow for a place to exist and transform over time. Documenting the landscape as undergoing a process of evolution.

The landscapes portray natural and unnatural growths such as piles of rocks, plants, or landfills. They begin to be the represent the summation physical activity and the absence of natural evolution.

Within each painting, I begin to re-create experiences, alternative realities, and their transformation. As paintings, they find a resolution when I decide that the space is teetering between formally “working” and possibly “failing.”

CV