Mariel Rolwing Montes

Region: MFA Annual

 My paintings explore forms of myth-making. Family photographs, moments captured from a car window, or collected screenshots serve as a point of departure. Contemporary delusion is embraced. The paintings are constructed through distinct layers. Hard walls become slippery surfaces that give way to thick impasto. A transmutation occurs, allowing space for contradictions, multiple timelines, and a precarity of physical space. I think of painting as a process of amalgamation; like the aftermath of a calamity, the process becomes a sort of sifting through of what is left washed up on the shore, from porcelain angels and foliage, to tightly wrapped cellophane and ghosts. I question our capacity for sentimentality in a culture saturated with banal symbols. I am interested in our new collective relationship to images and how we use them to construct our realities—in particular, a distortion of our way of looking, perceiving, and remembering. The point of collapse between history and myth is what drives my paintings; this instability as it relates to memory is their subject.