Grace Markley
/Grace Markley
I am a mixed media artist and I create colorful and vibrant images. I go for runs and am sparked with vivid moving images that pierce my mind and become the blueprints of themes and images in my work. I work with vintage magazines, acrylic, oil, and watercolor paint, ink, and printing blocks or screens. I use material to give an aesthetic of looking into memories. Images I subconsciously chose are special to the current experience of present time. I have retrieved memories from my subconscious that I had suppressed years ago by looking at a collage I did in the past. In my work I explore themes of human suffering, male violence against women, unity, escapism, and environmentalism. I obsess over the experience of suffering and healing only to find I must overcome once again similar to the practice of enlightenment. The human experience of being here right now leads me to find that achieving peace over and over again is crucial to my work. Since I was little, I have gone through life experiencing and observing. I do not take action to change any situation. I let it happen and analyze later however traumatic or beautiful the experience may be. I realize whatever is happening in the present moment was supposed to happen or else it wouldn't have. Art has been an outlet in communicating with the world around me and understanding life.
This piece is a farewell letter to my life as a student and all the skills my hands and eyes have learned through these four years. Themes that stuck out to me in life have been how good or evil humanity can be, as well as our ability to tune into other realms of consciousness. Each panel is a perspective that represents my observations through life on earth. A place I go to for comfort and escape, a place I always hoped the world would be, and a place I see in the world today. I am meditating on a better way of living and expressing environmental anxiety as well as the isolation and division caused by modern technology. The purple panel represents my mind palace, unconfined by time and space where anything can happen. It is an escape to a healing place to deal with great issues I would like to change about the world we live in today. It is unbearable to see the wildfires, landfills, wars, poverty, animals displaced, and plastic habitats. The green panel represents duality and the good that people can do with love and sustainability, to leave our planet better than we found it as consumers. The red panel may seem like a sci-fi post-human world, however it is merely a collage of all the things I see happen every day. Buildings replace the landscape and drones replace the stars. Construction orange fills the city. A texting driver throws his cigarette out the window.
