Artist Biography
Marissa Slack is a multidisciplinary artist from Hamilton, Ontario. She achieved a BFA in Studio Arts Honours Specialization at Western University in 2024. In 2023, she held an art history research internship with Western professor, John Hatch, in which she explored and analyzed Neo-Baroque artwork, media, and literature. She has been featured in a number of publications, and group and solo exhibitions. Her research and practice are informed by the Neo-Baroque, navigating existential comfort, and how media and film are used as tools for identification in an excessive world through central themes of morality, desire, and the romanticization and demonization of memory. Her paintings are influenced by the art of Expressionism and Impressionism, but as an artist of mixed Filipino and European descent, she utilizes Neo-Baroque notions of ‘otherness’ by rejecting the pressures of categorization and embracing hybrid forms. Marissa currently works as a Gallery Sales Associate at Crown and Press Art Gallery in Hamilton.
Artist Statement
In my work, I depict figurative scenes with the intention to elicit enigmatic and uneasy atmospheres within familiar spaces. My paintings are powered by light and tension, activated by luminosity from oil mediums. The concepts in my work are rooted in how many forms of media impact our identity during a period when access is overflowing, reflecting fixations that symbolize Neo-Baroque ideas of consumerism, hyper-individualization, and excess. My work is informed by several Neo-Baroque ideologies, specifically the idea of ‘existential comfort’, the certain taste for nostalgia that longs to escape the dullness of the present, and manifests itself within familiar spaces, objects, pleasurable colours, and passionate ambiences. Neo-Baroque rebellion against tradition influences my work as it confronts ideologies of the male gaze, modernist thinking, and dated, male dominated ideas surrounding emotion and identity in art. I explore cinematic atmospheres through painting, finding ways to make the entire space interesting in a manner that contrasts cinematography. My paintings combine linear narratives found in film and media with the ambiguity and openness of interpretation that painting has to offer. By working off of compositions or quotations from a film, I create the energy of a story rather than attempt to tell one.
