Mia Brownell, "Still Life with Garden Variety"

Description

Mia Brownell, "Still Life with Garden Variety"
Oil on canvas
10 x 12 inches

Artist Bio: Mia Brownell is a New York and Connecticut based artist whose paintings use the conventions of traditional food still-life painting, simultaneously referencing 17th century Dutch realism and the coiling configurations of scientific molecular imaging. The culture, science, and environmental issues surrounding the global industrial food complex often inspire Brownell’s sci-fi still life paintings. 

Artist Statement: For quite some time, the natural world has not been entirely natural. Nutrients and energy along with industrial compounds and pollutants – including plastics – move from the ecosystem to our bodies. My paintings explore a vivid and complex world of biochemical relationships that tie us to the earth and to all that we add to it. I imagine the entanglement between the industrial production of food and the molecular strains that then interact with our bodies. This is a paradoxical perspective, one that is equally rational and fantastical, material and in constant flux. If we are what we eat, what are we becoming? 

My paintings embellish the conventions of the painted food still life to probe the lines between food, culture, and biology. I invite viewers to contemplate the interaction between their body and the natural world, between their physiology and all the ways in which we shape and are shaped by our environment.