My recent paintings portray people absorbed by or reacting to images from mass media or historic forms of visual culture. Many paintings center around a reference to a recognizable cultural phenomenon--a Renaissance painting or sculpture, a lowbrow tv show, or a movie from the golden age of cinema--to provide the viewer with an entry point into the narrative. In others, my subjects are looking at screens that the viewer can’t see, completely engrossed in these unknown narratives. I insert these characters into situations that are at once tragic and comic: some characters mimic tropes from mass media with their body language conveying visible decisions, as with the subjects who hide beneath furniture from people who don’t know they are there. Devouring popular images and tropes and spitting them back out onto the canvas with caring painterly attention but a critical eye, I inject humor and absurdity into provocative and sometimes morally-ambiguous examinations of interpersonal experience.
In depicting people examining and circumventing social encounters rather than participating in them, I explore themes of selfhood and otherness. Frequently, the protagonist responding to these externally-sourced images is an exaggerated version of myself. This character is sometimes mischievous and other times critical, naive, or haunted. Often she is watching movies that were intended to be considered romantic, and her ambiguous expressions might evince longing, jealousy, disgust, fear, or irreverence for the scenarios onscreen. She breaks the fourth wall by confronting the viewer with her own gaze. This act of looking confers power, though ultimately I subsume and relinquish my own image into a proliferating visual culture with curiosity and vulnerability.
—Maya Mason, 2025