Riley Staal

My artistic practice is a psychological pilgrimage to my own empowerment. I use sculpture, painting, and textiles to illustrate visions that come to me in dreams, nightmares, or climax. The absurdity of the subject matter flirts with the line between realism and surrealism. I am interested in the softness and fierceness of femininity, which I explore through contrasting texture, subject matter and color in paintings, ceramics, and crochet soft sculpture. My experiences with power exchanges are suspended in large format oil paintings that swallow the viewer as a vital participant of the scene. I use the male muse as a vessel to explore the power and bias of the artist’s hand, embracing distortion and exaggeration. I am depicting things I didn’t know existed—amazing sex, healthy relationships, and men who cry and do your laundry. By turning the male gaze on its head, I dominate men as subjects through the way I depict them, reclaiming my power as an artist and a woman. My work presents alternative narratives to the harmful, gendered expectations I experienced in my younger years, in hopes that others experiencing the pressures of normative gender roles see the possibilities that are available to them: lives full of pleasure, empowerment, absurdity, and play.