Untitled

Michelle Raw­lings’ new image is a pain­terly proces­sing of a specific field of visual cul­ture, con­tem­porary fashion photography and out­fits alluding to historical clichés of girlishness.

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

The sour yellow color used in this textured piece was inspired by the aesthetics of the 60s and 70s.

Dividers

The intimate scale of the objects, modeled on the struc­ture of room dividers under­lines the idiosyn­cratic and imprac­tical nature of these items. The pain­tings they’re com­posed of are made of silk, hand-​embroidered, pain­ted and printed.

Untitled

“I was interested in making this piece a very faint minimalist ren­dition of that pat­tern of color. It was impor­tant to me to make the colors so similar in tone that if one were color blind or if one were seeing it in black-and-white it might seem to be all one color. I love the feeling of these very subtle color shifts.”

Untitled

The realm of Rawlings’ visual pur­suits is in large part focused on the sub­ject of girl­hood or woman­hood. She often creates her pain­tings, par­ticularly por­traits, from found images col­lec­ted and kept from magazines and newspapers.

Dance dance revolution

Rawlings’ pain­tings are often based on material found in magazines or newspapers—she’s especially interested in images that feel pain­terly. This pain­ting was inspired by a pic­ture of a young man playing the arcade game called Dance Dance Revolution, cap­tioned as a game that Adam Lanza was playing shor­tly before the Sandy Hook shooting. The artist worked with the image in Photoshop and created a pixelated ver­sion of it, similar to her rain­bow pixel series.

Clip art rose

Rawlings is inspired by random visual material found in new­spapers and magazines but also online. The motif of a clip art rose is banal yet very popular, and was used by the artist a few times. In this pain­ting however it was sup­posed to look like a specimen from a botanical pain­ting book.

Untitled

Rawlings’ works record her visual sear­ches: from randomly-​selected magazine clip­pings, through mon­tages of found photos, to images appropriated from the inter­net. At times they also inc­lude other actual works of art. This piece is in fact a small corner of a con­tem­porary work the artist found an image of somewhere.

Pixel rainbow series

The naive rain­bow colors of chil­dhood that one finds in clas­srooms and other institutions also cor­respond to the human chakra system and auric body around a person. This spiritual imagery was Rawlings’ inspiration for the pixelated series of rain­bow paintings.

Monochromatic series

Green Stripe

Untitled

Self-portraits

Rawlings is interested in the proces­ses of com­pres­sing and infan­tilization of art and art history for the pur­poses of education or pop cul­ture, which leads her to not only analyzing the rhetoric of school books on art, but also to con­juring up the artistic fan­tasies of teenagers in her work. The point of reference for this series was an art project the artist did in high school: she made self-​portraits in which she laid down a lot of really heavy wet paint and carved into them before they dried.

Untitled

artbabygirl

Rawlings’ pain­tings are a record of the artist’s visual sear­ches: either teeming with randomly-​selected magazine clip­pings, or based on mon­tages of found photos, sometimes also made of images appropriated from the inter­net. This piece was appropriated from a pain­ting of Space Jam’s Lola Bunny found on Instagram and hash­tag­ged #artbabygirl.