Royal Disillusion

January 30, 2021 - June 27, 2021

Zära Monet Feeney

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.

This exhibition psychoanalyzes the horrors of our current pandemic, political warfare, personal trauma, and the mental delirium of quarantine. The paintings scintillate and fade between sinister and majestic, grotesque and imperial, exposing the emotional upheaval of cognitive dissonance and dissociation. Using obscured installation and subtle shifts of color and light temperature, the viewing experience becomes nuanced and introspective.

More broadly, the paintings also engage in a conversation with intersectional queer feminism, traditional voyueristic compositions, the male gaze and socio-sexual empowerment issues. Aesthetically, they illuminate an Old Master 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.

Feeney’s paintings are published in Huffington Post, Manifest, Juxtapoz, BeautifulBizarre, Young-Space, Uproxx and Art in America. She has been awarded fourteen solo shows and thirty seven selected group exhibitions in the past five years. Her credentials also include numerous national and international art residencies and first place honors at juried group competitions. She has a Bachelor of Arts from University of California Los Angeles and a Master of Fine Arts from Laguna College of Art and Design. Feeney is a college professor and exhibiting artist based in Los Angeles