Five on the First
March 2024
Natalie Strait
Through a semi-autobiographic and queer lens, Natalie Strait's paintings explore personal and psychological lived realities of womanhood, navigating the interplay between emotional vulnerability and gendered, social-media-enforced performativity. Strait’s imposing, majestic female figures make their presence known — their sculpturally-molded bodies commanding the full space of the canvas and their unflinching gazes directly confronting the viewer. Her sources draw from vernacular images of women, spanning from vintage pornography discovered on Reddit, to spreads from 1970s Playboys, to the unrelenting scroll of candid pictures of friends, selfies, and algorithmical images that populate her social media. Using the poses and bodies discovered in those images as an anchor, Strait then introduces details, moments and sceneries both real and imagined to create new worlds of her own, striking a precarious balance of the banal and fantastical.
Loveless, Oil on canvas, 12 x 16 inches (2024)
Toasted, Oil, oil stick, and sequins on canvas, 14 x 14 inches (2024)
Hangover, Oil on canvas, 10 x 10 inches (2024)
Scrunch, Oil on canvas, 8 x 10 inches (2024)
View, Oil and sequin on canvas, 9 x 11 inches (2024)