Daphne Sweet
Artist Statement
By co-opting familiar tropes of antiquity, my work reimagines the narratives and symbolism of art history. These myths are often recontextualized by examining the interplay of ambiguity and awareness within female sensuality. A visual vocabulary of personal allegory (vase, flames, oranges, grapes, cows, phones, cherubs, arrows, droppletes, tiger stripe, columns, halos, dismembered hands, etc.) are repeated throughout the work to create the dialogue between these figures and their environments. Color and line work are continuously informing each other, pushing and pulling between the various mediums on the surface.
These vibrant and seductive figures reinforce their agency through my choice of colors and application of the paint, along with the symbolism of self reflection by use of a modern rectangular mirror: the phone.
About Daphne Sweet
Daphne Sweet is a Montana-based multidisciplinary artist with an emphasis on painting. Her work ranges from clothing design to animation. Bouncing between classical references and personal allegory, the paintings and found objects in Sweet’s work reanimate historical motifs with bold color, heavy patterning, and playful mark making. Stoic expressions of classic Greek sculptures, flirtatious line work of Rococo, lustrous fruit in Dutch still lives and graphic patterning cultivated by Matisse, are referenced throughout the work. By removing the precious/remote view of antiquity, and the ‘female nude’ from the male gaze, Sweets voluptuous figures assert their agency.
The Kiss
Cupid A Captive in Pearl
Cupid A Captive in Citron