Prusa, Carol

Made Up, a body of paintings, expresses my love/loathe relationship with the beauty/fashion industries and the fantasy/deception they instill. Aging amplifies my fear of being rejected or invisible and is assuaged by being made-up. Pages torn from fashion layouts are manually distressed to become the visually striking crumpled images that are the basis for my painting. The wrinkled nature of my source communicates my frustration with aging and never being able to meet the standards of modern beauty ideals. My careful repainting of the disfiguration demonstrates my desire to intimately repair and own the image. In taking my power back through painting, the defiled magazine spread becomes a layout of my ability and power as a painter to create and control the illusion. Paint enables me to accept myself through the virtuosity of its application, scale, and in the resulting illusion, in which cathartic moments of subversive humor play out.

My thesis exhibition “Mercury Express” is the culmination of my creative research and the paintings that I have created over the past three years. This body of work is comprised of fourteen oil glaze paintings on canvas, ranging in size from 16x 16 inches to 36 x 48 inches. These paintings demonstrate, through subjective color and the application of misty layers of luminous paint, my residence on the edge of moving to the future and looking to the past. Through imagination my paintings express a longing for connections and offer glimpses of happiness tinted with a pervasive overcast of melancholy. Mercury Express is a visual expression of what I consider to be ‘Kitsch’, ‘Sentimental’ and ‘Adventurous’. Through this work I salvage and renew the child-like wonder that managed to survive into my adulthood. Through the positioning of remembered objects in imaginary landscapes, Mercury Express recalls and explores my childhood memories, ideas and aspirations to reclaim the wonder I have lost as an adult.

My thesis body of work offers a bridge into the physical, emotional, and spiritual
scarring caused by global intolerance towards the LGBTQIA+ community and
oppression embedded by patriarchal power. This body of work is a collection of
resurfaced history and experiences transformed physically by intentionally subverting
hyper-masculine materials into knots. My objective is to deconstruct individual knotted
cords that make up the fabric of my identity and reconstruct them into an installation.
Renascence offers a visceral experience for the audience that aesthetically explores the
body’s transformation as it heals. This thesis asserts a place within a reflective, fluid,
transitional identity expressing the intersection of the temporality and body that I occupy
as a Queer, Latinx artist of color. Working across media, Renascence incorporates
performance, photography, paper, paint, projection, mirrors and built environments.

Power of Wrapping explores and communicates the somaesthetically inspired artistic act of wrapping as a generative force for healing. This thesis exhibition is an installation of artwork comprised of the combined forms and outcomes from two types of investigation. One, a studio practice in which my own somatic engagement, collaborates with my personal aesthetics of form, to produce two kinds of exhibited work. The first is a large traditionally wrapped Japanese temari and the second, involves twenty low-relief two dimensional wrappings on eight-inch stretcher frames and configured in a circular pattern with a larger wrapped stretcher frame in the center. Two, a social practice which embodies relationally and somaesthetically inspired art making within community groups, as generators of a large hanging form of wrapped hula hoops. In its totality, the installation is an expression of the idea that the body is essential to both making art and experiencing art.

The culmination of my graduate research and investigations is my thesis
exhibition Solace; Intimately Remembered Places. This body of paintings is a visual
representation of land, water and flora that focuses on my abstraction of nature to extract
essential elements that expresses my deep connection to a specific time and place, layered
with associated memories. By revisiting a landscape over a sustained period of time, I
developed a personal visual vocabulary to communicate the essential abstract forms of
nature and record the subtle nuances of color, light, shape, texture, positive and negative
space to evoke a particular time and place. I expanded my painting techniques through
the addition of a laser cutter. Rooted in a background of graphic design, my thesis also
incorporated and included a book form using similar strategies.

Lifeline: Expressions of Intimacy Through Paint is a body of paintings that seeks
to bridge physical distance by sensually applying layers of oil paint to recreate the
physicality of my husband. I allow the viewer to enter into a private exchange by the use
of intimately charged spaces, like the bed, which demonstrates how paint can be a
conduit for touch in absentia. By intensely remembering my partner in these works, I
reconstitute my knowing him through paint and seek to move beyond mere representation
to know and express him better. Therefore, these paintings not only bridge the physical
distance between my body and his, but search for meaningful expressions of my internal
conversations as I make visual discoveries that expand my understanding of him.

Allusions explores the volatile nature of intimate relationships by revisiting and
recovering my memory of dramatic experiences in my own intimate relationships then
translating them into painted psychological scenes. These scenes are activated by
symbolically charged objects and interrupted by openings or portals serving as points of
entry or exit. The people involved are referred to by pieces of carefully chosen furniture
situated in a space that has shifting perspectives and illogical planes, referencing the
complexity of memory and the subjectivity of experience. Discordant color, texture, and
layered information are used to heighten the drama of the moment. These painted panels
and ceramic structures are a manifestation of my mental processing of interpersonal
exchanges and remembered experiences through the development of a unique visual
vocabulary in paint.

Curious to understand my fascination with and attraction to certain individuals who live and work
in urban, often economically disadvantaged environments, my thesis exhibition explores properties of paint
and image to develop a personal and compelling visual vocabulary that communicates as well as celebrates
the strength, power, confidence and swag of these individuals. This work investigates the "face" people
front in public in order to survive their situations. Representing individuals within my own community in
Miami, these portraits help me come to terms with the way I too have adopted and performed identities of
survival. Additionally, I want this work to make visual record of these compelling individuals rarely
acknowledged within the history of art.

My thesis body of work developed from a desire to examine my
nonrepresentational artwork in relation to the concept of entropy - the law of
thermodynamics that measures the gradual, steady disintegration in a system such as our
world. Experimenting with a range of approaches and mediums, I resolved to radically
manipulate the inkjet printing of my digital photography files to introduce chance and
provoke decay. The resulting prints operate as an orchestrated chaos alluding to
environmental decline and collapse, and by extension, potential social degeneration. My
art reflects my perceptions of our times as well as adds to the problem. I continue to
produce waste through the consumption of materials. I contaminate through inks. I add to
landfills with failures. My artwork points out the inevitable end.