Artist Statement:
My work is primarily ink paintings on paper, often with materials such as wire and beads media. It is vividly detailed and labor-intensive. I create individual elements consisting of fantastical characters, interiors and landscapes, then assemble them into three-dimensional worlds that are immersive and sprawling. These subjects have a particular enchantment that mixes biographical events with raw emotions.
My intent is to offer unedited internal events. The realism of my work is revealed through a narration of things. My main objective is to translate that specificity into a more spiritual context.
I purposely maintain an approach of ambiguity towards my own psychological layers and that of my subject matter. I create my work piece by piece, one thing leading to the next. Like a trail of instinct. I want to preserve the enigma of my unconscious and not be inhibited by the ego.
My work has cinematic elements as it passes through time and space, like scenes in a film- or a dream. It acts as a vacuum that sucks in information while spitting out bodily fluids, humor, horror, fear & pleasure.
Many elements in my work are painted in what I refer to as a "classical" style. I think classical can be associated as “one with beauty.” It is seductive like the forbidden fruit promising to lure you into heaven and hell.
Bio:
Shiri Mordechay was born in Israel and raised in Nigeria. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from School of Visual Arts in New York, where she now lives. Solo exhibitions have occurred in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Italy. In 2013, she was named as one of “25 Artists to Watch & Collect” by Artvoices Magazine. She has been interviewed by Juxtapoz, Artillery and Art in America magazines. She was featured in the 2020 New American Paintings publication (juried by Jerry Saltz). Mordechay describes her paintings as if the ideas arrive from outside- yet anyone with an eye for the grotesque and sardonic can spot the humor that could only be her own. Imagery seems to arrive by chance and move about within a pre-moral realm and conjure what Julia Kristeva calls an “oceanic feeling.”