dusk

omfg_astrid

astrid underpainting

Sylvoen Kandi

GONCHAROV (1973)  dir. Martin Scorsese 

[alternative text: Image showing a glass painting palette resting on a white surface. The palette is has a number of mixes of paint on it. Ranging in colors from a deep red, to a warm brown, to peachy shades of pink orange. There’s a brush in the middle of the photo. And to the right there’s a bit of an unfinished painting with some of the same color. The paint strokes are loose and playful.]

[Alternative Text: Shows an image that says black trans lives matter many times. The repetion starts with black words and then repeats downwards alternating between black and white. The lines grow closer together and are placed behind the previous this repeats until they are almost entirely overlapping. The background is a overly saturated purple.]

[Alternative text: Shows a detail of a painting of that has a slightly wilted rose. The rose is yellow with browns and golds in shadows and highlights. The background is stark white. There the top of a red bottle in the bottom left. There's a few other stems coming out of the top of the bottle.]

Artist Statement: Advanced by Jose Esteban Munoz’s writing in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Warhol's work Still Life (Flowers) can be read as queering a Coca-Cola bottle by adding a flower to it. My work offers an examination of this concept in the modern day. It provides a commentary on Coca-Cola’s participation in pinkwashing queer pride. Pinkwashing in the context of pride is companies using sponsorships to improve public relations and plastering products with rainbows to profit while not contributing to or actively fighting against systemic change.

Artist statement: This work explores the beauty and normality of these objects after just over a year of taking estradiol.