Alyssa Monks with SLOMA Chief Curator Emma Saperstein

Spanning the past two decades of her career, Alyssa Monks: Be Perfectly Still features the artist’s large-scale portraits, painted lushly and expressively. The exhibition is curated by SLOMA (San Luis Obispo Museum of Art) Chief Curator Emma Saperstein and is on view through November 13, 2022. Depicting the artist and those closest to her in intimate contexts, Monks’ paintings are simultaneously vulnerable and elusive, revealing her subjects in exposed positions but offering fragmented views through composition that invert foreground and background. Using semi-transparent filters of glass, vinyl, steam, water, or foliage, Monks creates surface tension that obscures the subject and disorients the viewer.