Natalie Westbrook
Paranoia Peppermint
April 22 - May 29, 2011
Opening Reception, Friday April 22, 6-9pm
INTERSTATE PROJECTS is pleased to present Natalie Westbrook’s first solo exhibition, Paranoia Peppermint. Plant life has an uncanny relationship to the human body in Westbrook’s paintings. Exuberant growth inspires a mutability of forms, similar to kudzu growing over a suburban landscape. Westbrook’s work ponders the primordial pool: genes collide, adapting and transforming. Eggs and fruit evoke bloated flesh, consumption and fertility, while biological reproductive impulses manifest through saturated, frenetic patterning.
A body of work developed over the last two years, Paranoia Peppermint demonstrates the progression of Westbrook’s expanding vocabulary of visual metaphor. Objects are camouflaged through sign, color, pattern and shape. In a portrait, oil paint squeezed from a pastry tube simultaneously exists as frosting, decoration, a girl’s curly hair, Medusa’s snakes, and feces. In a series of drawings that began during a research trip to Hawaii, direct rubbings of tropical leaves are the starting point for anachronistic landscapes, abstract compositions, and playful depictions of a strange natural world.
Natalie Westbrook (b.1980) lives and works in New Haven, CT. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art in 2002, and her MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of Louisville in 2004. She received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2010.
