From the Hotel Rooms series

Sarah - My paintings seek to explore and critique social conventions as they play out in familiar, identifiable places (i.e. collectors’ homes, idyllic landscapes, honeymoon suites, and hotel rooms). I use clichés and other familiar images as a way to relate to the viewer on visual common ground. I take my source material from Google image searches, choosing keywords that are as vague as possible like “landscape” or “sunset” to seek out the mean visual definition as defined by the collective consciousness on the web, a metaphorical Jungian visual dictionary. I mix these images with memories, images from fashion magazines, art history and advertisements – essentially deconstructing the visual landscape that informs me daily. Painting allows me to combine these spaces and ideas, and distill them into a single picture. The skewed perspectives and varying degrees of flatness in my painting signify the variety of source-material, as well as the problems in believing in an image, idea, or memory as “absolute” or “real.”

Boyan - There is so much to take from these paintings. They are full of detail, focus and messages. Elements such as the carpets which would otherwise simply blend into the image, here add a great deal to them. Because the paintings are set in such identifiable places, it is easy for Sarah to then take us on a journey beyond.

See more of her work Sarah Thibault