2021 Senior Exhibition Artists

Tessa Remy-Miller

Art + Design: Painting

About Tessa Remy-Miller

Tessa Remy-Miller is an undergraduate student studying to complete her BFA degree in Painting at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She works primarily with the figure and expressive color.

Statement

I have always fallen into bouts of depression and anxiety. While sometimes having trouble separating reality from mind and emotion, I want to create work that helps solidify and illuminate those experiences. By choice and by happenstance, for many years I have isolated myself as an attempt to lessen any outside stimuli that may enhance my anxieties. That ‘alone-ness’ has left me hesitant in many situations. My paintings have become a vehicle for me to voice my inner feelings and thoughts that I am too nervous to express vocally, or even unsure of how to voice.

The portrayal of myself as a painted image happens through a process in which time alone brings into focus my emotions and circumstances, and with the many self-portrait photographs comes together in an attempt to evoke what is happening inside me. I use recycled, forgotten, and broken materials as canvases to ease the intimidation of having to make something ‘perfect’. Without making each painting precious, and allowing quick decisions to occur, a collection of truer, often unconscious, portraits are created.