Contemporary (Pain)tings: Live, Laugh, Love is a series that critiques the commodification of emotion, the erasure of grief, and the superficiality of modern culture's obsession with positivity. Using found materials, archival imagery, and provocative text, the work examines how vulnerability, resilience, and human complexity are often flattened into consumable narratives. The series disrupts the saccharine ethos of "live, laugh, love" by confronting the societal tendency to suppress discomfort and sanitize pain in favor of curated joy.

Through the juxtaposition of rugged, tactile surfaces with delicate, emotive elements, the work reveals the tension between strength and fragility, tradition and modernity, individual experience and collective history. Phrases like "unfollow grief" and "you see right through me" highlight the pervasive cultural impulse to avoid difficult emotions and perpetuate a culture of detachment, performativity, and digital disconnection.

This series invites viewers to consider the cost of toxic positivity and the narratives we erase in our pursuit of convenience and comfort. By layering historical and contemporary imagery with text, the work acts as both a critique and a call to reclaim emotional depth, authenticity, and the messy, unfiltered realities of human experience. In doing so, it becomes a meditation on the ways we live, the things we laugh at, and what it truly means to love in an age of disconnection and curated lives.

Work Titles and Info:

1) “crocodile tears” , oil on found door panel, 60 x 42 centimeters

2) “brat summer is over”, oil on found transparency sheet, 35 x 30 centimeters

3) “memoji”, oil on found turn table panel

4) “guillotine”, oil and antique magazine paper on found panel, 122.5 x 40 centimeters

5) “#healing” oil and acrylic on found panel, 120 x 120 centimeters

6) “dog eat dog world”, oil, antique magazine, colored graphite on found brick and panel, variable dimensions

7) “heart of glass, mind of stone”, oil and antique magazine paper, found light panel cover, 16.5 x 122.5 centimeters

8) “a few loose screws”, oil, antique magazine, found screws on found panel, 40 x 30 centimeters