My paintings explore touch and its relation to colour, surface, and physical presence. Touch is the only sensation given to the figure, as it exists as a complete tangle of arms and legs.
Mariah Ferrari’s practice explores themes surrounding fabricated sentience and the capacity to feel, perceive or experience subjectively.
She depicts the sensation of touch through disembodied hands, allowing the viewer to focus on this singular sense. Hyperreal colour and lighting bring the figures to life, enhancing the plausibility of the environment whilst bringing its utter absurdness to the viewer’s attention.
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Upon the surface of colour are water drops, saturating the figure and ground. The physicality of water creates a haptic response, bringing the viewers' attention to their own body and responses to being wet.
Water saturates both the figure and the ground, highlighting the still surface of water before submergence.
As Ferrari explains, water provides “opportune moments for painting, such as highlight, shadow, and brush variety”. The figure interacts through playful touch and slippery movements, contained in a dreamlike state. This challenges our perception of sentience both in actuality and simulation, “centering the viewer’s focus on touch and its concealed qualities brings attention to the sensory event of being alive”.
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“Unreal colour, light, and water bring the figure’s ground to life, creating an environment enveloped in sensory information,” explains Ferrari. “Colour and light create a layer of content in visual touch, as colours appear soft or hard, smooth or rough, immediate or still.”
Mariah Ferrari
Honeynut
2022
Mariah Ferrari
Daytime Nightshade
2022
Mariah Ferrari
Soft Serve
2022
Mariah Ferrari
Sweet Orange Scab
2022
Mariah Ferrari
Wintergreen
2022
Unreal colour challenges the viewer's preconceived associations with this colour, transforming it into something tangible, physical, and admirable.
About the Artist
Mariah Ferrari (b. 1996, USA) is a contemporary visual artist based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2019. Ferrari’s work has been shown in several exhibitions across the US and in The Netherlands, London and Belgium as well as publications including Art Maze Magazine, Spring Edition Issue 12, New American Paintings, No. 149 Midwest Issue and Friend of the Artist, Volume 12.
Chosen Charity
Chosen Charity
Milwaukee Women's Center
Founded in 1980, the Milwaukee Women’s Center provides comprehensive services and treatment for women, men, and children whose lives have been affected by domestic violence, addiction, mental health issues, homelessness and poverty.