Liliana Monge

As an artist, I am interested in inner worlds created through feverish imagination and diaspora. This body of work is an investigation of cultural liminality and ancestral grief within dream-like worlds of in-between. The paintings become spaces the figures within them can explore dying cultural practices, resistance, anxiety, grief, and loneliness within the bounds of safety offered by storytelling and imaginary play.

Through the use of incorporated sculpture, the works often walk a thin line between imagined space and the viewer's physical reality. Figures and landscapes linger together, sometimes becoming one and the same. The solitary cool-toned worlds are woven and bound together by an underlying web of warm pigments which holds all things. References for the natural worlds within the paintings are gathered from plants, rocks, and earth native to the land I was raised on, but foreign to the landscapes and processes of my family’s traditions. This hybridity of cultural practice mirrors my own mixed identity and embedded uncertainty in making. In adapting these processes to the land I call home, I ground conversations about indigeneity and ancestral knowledge in my context, while living removed from homelands.