CV
ABOUT
I engage the viewer in a multifaceted narrative of ecology and the ways in which disaster and natural phenomena create, destroy, and recreate systems of entropy & organization. The suggested human influence and form within the works is a spectre of the body; ineffable and infinitesimal in its fragility, androgyny, and escapism. Man made structures are superimposed onto the stage of nature they push against, irradiated with impossible light and populated by preternatural species relationships and machinations.
Our mythologies, cultural concepts, and identities are reliant on the landscapes they are immersed in. On rapidly shifting ground, the canon shakes too, and the language of the apocalyptic mirrors the paradigm of the Anthropocene. I liken the seismic stirrings of the psyche to dynamic cycles; catastrophic weather events, species migration, resource extraction. Thus I seek to establish a tether to the natural world, and mythologize the beauty of devastation, the harmony of violence, the terror of stillness; opposites merged as spokes in an endlessly turning wheel.
Holding a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, Valerie Mirra’s work marries ecology with spirituality, intuiting the line between the inner and outer worlds of symbols. Born in Belarus, Mirra’s relationship to place is influenced by a lifetime of travel, immigration, and displacement. Throughout years of constant motion, she has maintained a devoted plein air practice around the world, including Eastern and Western Europe, Central America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the United States from Louisiana to Alaska.
These on-site works are frequently the impetus for her life-size and panoramic figurative paintings, integrating the radical presence of deep looking with a powerful symbolic lexicon which transfigure these visceral experiences. The resulting paintings draw from the extreme vulnerability of the wilderness and the human body within it, seeking to invoke the physical presence of her subjects in their complex simultaneity, violence, placidity, and devastated beauty.
Mirra’s work in and love for the backcountry have honed her skills as a naturalist, which carry over into paintings of collapsed time periods, layered ecosystems in dense compositions, and environments on the brink of collapse or the cusp of regeneration.