Ayana Ross is a visual artist whose work, using figurative realism, combines traditional oil painting methods with the elaborate treatment and decorative design as a visual language to evoke nostalgia, elevate her subjects, and provide greater context into her work.

Often autobiographical in nature, Ross’s paintings weave together layered narratives to explore social and intergenerational themes, including identity, race, equity, and the broader evaluation of our value systems. Her work seeks to highlight the profound lessons we can draw from everyday people and moments.

 Painting allows me to explore perception, the space between emotion and cognition. I paint to produce new, visual patterns that, in turn, produce new patterns of thought, an array of colors and lines that stimulate the dance of neurons in the brain. Moiré patterns are the active, warping armature on which I explore color theory and the effect of color on the mind. These patterns are composed of lines so thin that they’re nearly just edges, carrying gradients that vary in hue and saturation.

 My work, primarily expressed through painting and installations, is a symbolic celebration of existential and intellectual inquiries that are fundamental to me, as they are deeply inspired by my intimate and spiritual life. Through a nuanced lens, I explore masculinity, identity, race, relationships, and love—complex and often controversial themes filtered through a personal and poetic perspective.

 My work reimagines the ancient technique of buon fresco painting through a contemporary lens. While fresco was once a dominant medium in architectural spaces, its demanding process and technical complexity have made it nearly obsolete today. I am interested in reviving this medium in ways that honor its rich history and make it relevant to modern audiences.

 Mutone’s musings center on figures within intimate settings and warping memory. She employs abstraction by pushing images back and forth within a digital editing realm and funneling the compilation into oil paint. She works to mediate her opaque, geometric paint application with the overall impact of translucent, layered fluidity. This obfuscation of Mutone’s digital touch plays with legibility and allows the viewer to piece together the composition. Duplications of a single subject are set in motion, yet housed in a stagnant space.

 My landscape paintings use light and shadow as physical subjects, considering outdoor spaces—often parks and roadsides—close to me. I use plaster to build texture beneath the paint, embedding landscape ephemera while referencing the complex information systems that exist in nature.

 Born in Cuba and raised in Miami, I started taking painting classes at the age of ten with a Cuban artist who had studied in Spain. So, my training was traditional.

 My work emerges from my practice of seeing. Observing nature and myself, I witness transient ephemera such as shifting shadows on pavement or the colors visible when closing my eyes to kiss my partner. Engaging with fluid acrylic paints, I work instinctively, reacting in collaboration with the mediums and allowing the fluidity of the suspended pigments to employ its own movements and inform my next gesture. It is through this practice that I learn to embrace, rather than fear, the changes that I cannot control.

 What began as simply drawing upon my immediate surroundings during the Covid pandemic shutdown in 2020, these recent paintings have evolved into explorations of a kind of magical realism. Subjects seem to awaken with sentience, embarking on hallucinatory journeys that intertwine pleasure and conspiracy. Through this transformation, the ordinary dissolves into a realm where the mundane and the paranormal, desire and paranoia, bleed freely.

 Within these unnatural botanical landscapes, the viewer is invited to explore and ponder the realities and possibilities of symbiotic relationships. I have always been influenced by science fiction, but today the reality of science’s impact on society is a surprisingly fractious subject. Whether trying to survive a pandemic, dodge mysterious drones, or combat the effects of climate change, our daily lives include confronting nature in beautiful and terrifying situations.