The protagonists and antagonists of these worlds are my own reimagining of the monstrous and uncanny women in Slavic, Norse, and Greek mythology. They live with the demons of their history and failures, reveling in hedonism to cope with their situation. In my paintings they revel in self destruction and hedonism to cope with their situation. Each painting functions as a parallel world adjacent but separate from our modern day world and the world of myth, where colors and brushstrokes show both the mental state of the characters and the composition of the world. I focus on creating sympathy and a source of comfort for the characters within the painting, as play and lightheartedness is vital to surviving turbulent experiences. Despite the torment the characters go through, my work rejects nihilism and polarization of what is considered monstrous. Their monstrosity is what allows them to adapt and thrive in turbulence and boredom.

Though they are part of a 12 piece anthology, each piece is meant to be seen individually, like pages in a fairytale book. Just as how when parallel worlds collide it results in a rip in time and space, it would be an anomaly for the paintings to clash together. 


Olympia Martin

Marie Antoinette, October 6, 2020. Acrylic paint on gessoed canvas

For the prompt, I wanted to reimagine a historical figure associated in our cultural zeitgeist with drastic social changes. Marie Antoinette herself did not deliberately enact significant changes, but rather she was made into the embodiment of ecocentric grandiosity by the European press. Her beheading on October 16th, 1793, has been cemented as a symbol of revolution. In the 21st century, we are still living with significant class divides. Similarly, the 1% remains isolated from the plights of the lower class akin to the Dauphine in Versailles to the French working class. Additionally, the current global Coronavirus pandemic has disproportionately effected the economically unstable while the privileged can treat it as a self-improvement retreat or a joke. I wanted to depict this iconic figure with all the motifs of Rococo art forced into a situation of inconvenience. Though her grocery bags share the same sheer fabric of her dress, she is still weighed down by them. She wears a mismatch of coiffure wig and a party dress with sneakers to show to show the distastefulness of her opulence and the melding of bygone and contemporary values. She no longer can live in a detached reality, it has started to creep into her world.