NAIROBY MELLO

In this body of work, I scrutinize the impossibility of the expectation of expectations passed on to women throughout their lives. The Harsh Expectation encapsulates the many and often contradictory expectations that women are expected to meet in the domestic, academic, and professional spheres. I’m also interested in the expectations placed on women’s identity, sexuality, and physical appearance.This project is particularly important to me as I further investigate topics of feminist issues like this one, because I hope to utilize my own experiences and the experiences of other girls/women close to me, as inspiration for the theme of this body of work.

These paintings will depict figures intertwined in complex interpersonal situations within the home and institutional spaces. This series of work spans from multimedia drawings to large scale multimedia paintings. I create abstracted narratives with a limited palette consisting of fully saturated hues within a de-saturated field, to allude to transformation from one state into another. These cycles ask the viewer to reflect on the expectations placed on women as they navigate the stages of their lives. The use of line and surface texture also varies in order to signify transformation and/or scarring and ingrained trauma. It is my hope that the viewer can form a personal connection with the work, that they feel invited to engage in dialogue about the expectation, and that they feel motivated to advocate for social change in their immediate environment.