Lily Yvette Ansara McCusker
Ruby Dark,
Moonlight Pale
Ruby Dark, Moonlight Pale takes imagery, words, and feelings from my dreams, nightmares and subconscious and weaves them into surreal, collage-like compositions. Each work incorporates some element of self portraiture, and coincides with one or more poems or short stories I wrote. I use bold colors and lines, overlapping images, and glimpses of text to communicate intimate and ephemeral ideas in a lucid language.
Artist/Thesis Statement
The theme of my work concerns ideas of subconscious, semi-conscious, dreams, and the recurring imagery that can arise within them. I am immensely interested in the suggestive power of dreams, and the line of communication they create between our active and passive, rational and irrational, conscious and subconscious mind. I see these two concepts like a shaken up glass of oil and water - not quite separate, but can never be fully homogenized. Images and memories from reality drip through the surreal world of dreams, unveiling a glimpse of unrestricted feelings, impulses, fears and desires.
I take inspiration from my own dreams and nightmares, as well as my struggles with insomnia and the boundary between waking and sleeping. To attempt to represent the chimerical, fleeting nature of dreams and thoughts, I work in a fast pace, mutable fashion using materials such as gouache, acrylic, and ink - erasing, covering, and changing the images on my canvas to pin something evanescent and intangible into one composition. I began to include writing into the process of my work. I wrote short stories and poems based on my dreams and thoughts, and fragments of those words made their way into the final form of the paintings. The repetitive and translative process of converting my dreams to writing, and then to painting, has become an invaluable and inextricable part of my practice.
