New York based painter Alyssa Monks presents us with two types of image. One is of a modern-day dryad: a kind of hybrid, the naked female form overlaid with leaves and foliage, integrated into a vegetal world. The other is of the body fragmented and distorted by steam and water, glimpsed through a screen clouded by veils of vapour and mist. Her subjects are altered by their environment and exist in an elemental world of shifting perceptions.
She is an accomplished handler of oil paint. Although her fluent method is concerned with the abstractions and expressive possibilities of the painted surface, it still retains the particularity of representation. The paintings convey a sense of the self as mutable and dependent on environmental context. These figures exist in a world of flux, the painting medium a vehicle of potential change and transformation.
