Genesis by Korin Faught
Viridescent will be Faught’s first solo since her 2016 show, titled Lost Days, at CHG. Regarding her work, WideWalls shares: “Korin Faught’s elegant and subtle figurative paintings pay homage to the mid-century design, fashion, and white on white style. The artist from Los Angeles finds the inspiration for her mysterious and somewhat gothic depiction of women prevalently in photography and horror movies. The main topic of her work are twins or triplets – the artist is painting the same model in multiple poses in order to achieve this goal. Her work has a very specific atmosphere, solemnly dark and even unsettling at times, created by Faught’s limited palette and puzzling moods of her models.”
Regarding her new works, Faught shares: “Becoming a mother changed everything. My body had gone rogue — transforming into a nature vessel with life bursting from every part of me — a tree laden with fruit, a flower blooming. Moreover, I felt this obsessive love and need to defend and protect my family. With the pandemic raging, my family’s home became a sanctuary, an extension of my own body. These paintings are about family and protection. My family is the garden and I am the gardener.”
She adds, “Viridescent is an exploration of motherhood, sanctuary, and the parallels between gardens and familial life. During COVID many of us felt more strongly about protecting ourselves and those most delicate and dear to us, like our children. Domesticity took on new meaning, it became cloistered and as our lives slowed down and our focus narrowed, we began to take time to care for what mattered in a more intense way. Children, like plants and flowers, rely completely on our care and protection to be able to flourish and grow ─ and the similarities are not limited to nourishment, light, and moisture. Chlorophyll has an almost identical chemical structure as blood. I have bundled my figures safely in cloth as if ‘buried’ or ‘planted’ in a ‘womb-like’ state. The multiples of the figures show duality of emotions and perspectives.
Knowing the context of when these paintings were created, you can begin to understand a quiet, light, and radiance of spirit as my counterpoint to the fear and extremism of the outside world, a place of peacefulness and embodiment of our desires to be cared for by a mother figure. In these new works, the maternal figure is depicted in control of her environment, reminiscent of painters such as Marie Cassatt. As the noise of life quieted down, I found time for self-reflection and introspection, these portraits give the viewer a window into the garden of my life that I have created.”