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Monica is an artist and educator based in New York and Connecticut. Since 2000, she has taught architecture, design, visual art, and digital media at the high school and college levels.
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"I draw on abstract painted fields. My work fluctuates between disfiguration and figuration, and familiar objects oscillate between layered fields. The picture plane is amassed to create spatial amplification and zones of deletion." I use accumulation and deletion to explore the instability of perception. Layers of paint are applied to expose how form is continuously negotiated. I consider how tectonic and bodily systems mirror one another in their capacity for adaptation, distortion, and reconstruction.
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The Erasure series comprises multiple interrelated strands, Erasure, Erasure Smash, and Erasure Smash: Reconfigure, that collectively examine the instability of form, identity, and embodiment through layering, redaction, and recomposition.
The figure is simultaneously reconstituting and disintegrating. Despite this instability, two elements persist across iterations: an exposed intestinal interior and an open mouth. These recurring features serve as corporeal constants, suggesting cycles of intake and expulsion. The figures are rendered neither whole nor absent, but perpetually unresolved.
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Formally, the work engages the politics of form through dense gestural accumulations, chromatic tension, and exaggerated contouring. Thick lines both assert and destabilize structure, enacting erasure as a productive visual strategy. The paintings generate speculative anatomies that resist categorical legibility and fixed identity. Influences from architectural figure-ground thinking shape how bodies and space interact, producing hybrid, invented forms that resist fixed identity.
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In the Smash and Reconfigure strands, fragmentation accelerates through collision, compression, and recombination. These processes foreground temporality and process, privileging instability over coherence. Primary colors punctuate the surface as disruptive agents, structuring visual movement while resisting narrative closure.
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Across the series, erasure functions not as subtraction but as a generative methodology, an approach to making that foregrounds uncertainty, contradiction, and flux. The work contributes to ongoing discourse on abstraction, the body, and representation by positioning form as contingent, provisional, and perpetually in formation.
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The species work utilizes concepts derived from observations that demonstrate biological systems. Projects are grown into architectonic composites that generate hyper-articulated forms and spatial fields. The species' work is grown through varied aggregation at multiple scales. The objective is the production of new organisms and organizational methods that represent morphogenetic evolutionary traits.
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The photography captures spontaneous moments, performances, and atmospheric conditions. Portraits are unposed and reflect the space and time they occupy.
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Education
Bachelor of Architecture, Cooper Union,
Master's of Advanced Architectural Design, Columbia University.
Master's in Education in Private School Leadership, Teachers' College, Columbia University (5/2007)
CTE UC Berkeley Extension, Teaching Credential California: Architecture/Engineering, Arts/ Media.
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