Showing March 25 to May 9th 2022
"Over the past few years I've grown a lot as a person in society, and I’ve come to understand how gender norms have permeated the world around me. There is no right or wrong way to ‘be’ in this life. I really hope to create a space through my practice where any individual can feel safe and encouraged to show up as themselves. I’ve dedicated ‘Herself’ as being an allowance of that being, whatever it may look like. A lot of the decisions made in the vibrant portraits of these women were up to them. I sat down with each subject and asked them to share who they were with me. Personally, my struggles have always been with feeling like I need to decide what that is, to make a choice on how I want to express my femininity, if at all. My answer to that is I don’t want to decide, I want to flow through life untethered to those things, but through painting I will continue to explore what it looks like, and attempt to make sense of what it means to me."
About the Artist
Marina Doukas is a Canadian painter whose work is often colourful and vibrant, and ranges from being thick and chaotic to blended and controlled. Her paintings explore themes of self expression and gender identity by bringing together abstract mark making and contemporary portraiture. Pulling from her knowledge of gesture and abstraction from her time at the
University of Guelph, she treats the paint as a tool to record her experiences with navigating gender as a spectrum and all of the moments of tension and discovery that may present themselves along the way. With the use of bright colours and various brush strokes, her paintings act as an ongoing investigation of identity and prioritizes authenticity and assertiveness of self through her explorations.
Instagram: @marinadoukas_art
AVAILABLE WORK:
Carousel, 2021
30x40 Oil & Acrylic on Canvas
$1500
Inner Workings (Diptych), 2021
12x16 (each) Oil & Acrylic on Canvas
$500 for both
Herself, 2021
18x24 Oil on Canvas
$1200
Alessandra, 2021
18x24 Oil on Canvas
$1000
Pinky, 2021
18x24 Oil on Canvas
$1000
100% of sales goes to the artist!