HoboEye Art:
Kristine Moran, Brooklyn, USA

"In this story, the other-worldly creature is a fragment of the protagonist's psyche, a sliver of his repressed inner life made visible."  - Marguerite Atwood

Artist Satement:
My artistic practice is based on the creation of a central character, which I situate in contentious sites of struggle. Various references from literature, film, mythology and art history enter into the work to make part of the narrative that runs throughout each painting.

The central protagonist in my work undergoes a metamorphic eruption, made up of human, animal and structural parts, revealing a primal quality that is both grotesque and glorious. The fractured elements are assembled together in order to express a manifestation of conditions that exists outside of the norm.

Particularly intriguing to me is the unearthing of human nature's innate region; that from which comes the ability to transform oneself into something seemingly incomprehensible or violent as a reaction to one’s environment. I'm interested in that moment where one is pushed beyond their own limits, and as a result, transformed into something absurd or unrecognizable. This narrative is the underpinning of the work and motivates the outcome of the central protagonist in the paintings. The embodiment of this struggle is reflected in the expressive and urgent quality of the painted gesture, manifested as an additive and subtractive painting process.

The fictional spaces induce a sense of foreboding; they are recognizable and yet there is uneasiness about them. These spaces act as metaphors for the underbelly of one's environment, be it in the city or one's mental environment, they are representative of the grit and rawness that bubbles just below the surface of society, that which exists among all of us but is seldom acknowledged.

In some ways, I think my paintings deal with what is unknowable in a person; they are an attempt to express what would be revealed if the mind were to have a direct outward manifestation of its unconscious state.
- Kristine Moran

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