Zära Monet’s paintings have been featured in LA Weekly, Huffington Post, Manifest, Juxtapoz and Beautiful Bizarre publications. She has been awarded eighteen solo shows and forty seven selected group exhibitions, including Museum of Art and History:Lancaster and Carnegie Art Museum: Oxnard. She has a BA from UCLA and an MFA from LCAD.
There is a specific moment when we suspend our disbelief and are seduced by an illusion. When this happens, we are not looking at something, but looking at ourselves perceiving it.
Zära Monet’s paintings psychoanalyze the idea of the feminine. Understanding the varying psychological aspects of the feminine is crucial in allowing us to understand the ways in which society and women interact, the expectations put on women, any problematic stereotypical gender roles as well as the nuanced and multifaceted relations between women themselves. The paintings scintillate and fade between sinister and majestic, grotesque and imperial, exposing the emotional upheaval of cognitive dissonance and dissociation. Using obscured perspectives and subtle shifts of color saturation and temperature, the viewing experience becomes nuanced and introspective.
Zära Monet’s paintings also engage in a conversation with intersectional queer feminism, traditional compositions, the male gaze and socio-sexual empowerment issues. Aesthetically, they illuminate an Old Master portrait style; the subjects are posed, the mood is dramatic, but they also exploit and contemporize it; the locus of composition is skewed, the light logic is reversed. Meticulously choreographing a dramatic dynamic between the subject and the space it occupies, the work is able to guide, critique and call into question the generic way a painting is received. The work is aimed to reify a psychological and reflexive viewing experience that ultimately transcends the viewer into an unknown consciousness.
Artist Statement
There’s a subtlety to the light in nature. Colors fluctuate warm to cool in often barely noticeable ways. The brilliant glow at sunrise to the sleepy blanket of moonlight. Notes of pale sage, icy blue and copper undertones.
Drifting into a soft, introspective state, the viewer can unveil a color story. The paintings pay close attention to when a hue graduates slowly or is placed adjacent to another to emphasize a temperature change.
The narrative feels dreamlike and romantic. A nod to classical portraits, the time, something you can’t quite place as past or present. When looking, a distant memory stirs and the painting becomes a stand-in.