Through layered acts of drawing, painting, erasing, and reforming, I expose the power structures embedded in visual culture and challenge the ways we’ve learned to see. Overbearing and problematized religious, political, and allegorical tropes of the past contrast sharply with today’s relentless flood of unregulated content. Who tells our stories, and in whose bodies do they unfold?

I turn to the past—not out of nostalgia, but to reckon with what we’ve inherited. These stories and images shape how we understand ourselves and the world we inhabit.

Drawing on familiar visual languages—religious iconography, classical composition, cinematic tropes—I invite viewers into a seemingly known world. Yet with closer inspection, this world fractures and reforms, revealing uncertainty and contradiction.

My work traces desire’s shaping of the body and the shifting landscapes of identity—how we long, endure, and remember.

The paintings defy clarity. Forms disintegrate, recompose, and refuse resolution. Painting, for me, is a process extended through time—mark by mark, mistake by mistake—each gesture bearing traces of failure and persistence, a quiet choreography of becoming.

I draw from art histories and contemporary currents in film, music, and photography. This amalgam becomes a process of sifting—catalyzing exploration into structure and meaning.

Recurring themes include the vulnerability and resilience of the body; the dynamics of power and control; the deep wounds left by loss of agency; the haunting impact of the objectifying gaze; the complex interplay of desire, identity, and embodiment; the fluidity of gender and the nuances of asexuality; and the enduring drive toward self-expression.

Within this shifting tension, the paintings confront questions that arise from history—continuing to shape and complicate our present.

-Lauren Moses, 2025