Artist Statement:

My figurative paintings explore technology, my identity as a neurodivergent female, and unrealistic beauty standards created by social media. As we become increasingly entwined in the digital world, I make paintings that hint at the rift and the romance between people and pixels. Recently, computer work, zoom classrooms, and online friends has turned my life digital. Thinking about my digital life, virtual places, and future concepts like the meta-verse I notice our online presence is valued over our physical lives. Living in a virtual reality is impossible to ignore, so I choose to embrace it by making work that references a digital realm. I fuse digital glitches and portraiture with oil paint and charcoal, layering images and colors. To do so, I deliberately use technologically advanced programs such as Photoshop, digital editing software, and apps in my process of creating. In my palette, I use saturated pigments and fluorescent paint to bring figuration out of abstraction and I combine local color with full-chroma pigments to replicate a digital space in the real world.

Dyslexia fractures images and words I see. This perspective aids the design of my hybrid compositions. My paintings reference a glitch that reflects the imperfect nature of the body and the mind. My work simultaneously deals with processing and accepting my identity as well as appearance ideals due to media pressures and the personal drive for thinness and self-objectification I dealt with as an adolescent and young adult. I am overwhelmed by a repetitive and idealized version of the female body that I have felt pressure to achieve online. I paint this idealized version by replicating the imagery I see on social media that leads to body image misperception and body dissatisfaction. The technical reorganization of the human environment and the human experience is a new, rich, and unnegotiable reality, full of troubling and promising potential. My work explores the fissures between the hopeful and concerned elements of this new relationship.

About the Artist:

Hannah Purvis is a Texas-based artist living and working in Houston, Texas. She received her BFA with a concentration in Painting from Texas State University in 2021. Combining figurative elements with abstraction she uses Painting to explore a fractured identity. She is interested in themes that relate to our advancing technology that combines portraits and figure painting with influences of the digital. Hannah has exhibited her work throughout Texas and is currently preparing for a solo exhibition at Spellerberg Gallery in Lockhart Texas.