I Saw It In You
Jaysun 24" x 30" Oil on Canvas
Nada 24" x 30" Oil on Canvas
This series draws upon a collective anxiety ignited by the impermanence of time. It is 2016 in Echo Park and we are waiting, or maybe we’re on the internet - watching our future happen to somebody else. We are trying, though. We stayed up all night attempting to extract something out of nothing. But in a place without seasons, it is harder to understand the ephemeral nature of everything. It is all one long day; the sky stays the same - but everything is always changing, and dying and being reborn.
This series is an act of preservation and resistance, a way to mirror my own existential uneasiness. I made paintings of my friends, just as they are. I studied them in their natural habitat, surrounded by all of the things they feel tethered to - household items, makeshift symbols, childhood nostalgia, other people. Making shrines to little gods. Feeling small. My paintings aim to keep them there in that place of tension - the time in life when everything felt alive and terrifying and electric.
© Andrea Nakhla 2019