The blue-green light of a cellphone screen illuminates the face of a lone figure sprawled on a rumpled bed late at night. The people in Rebecca Ness’s paintings are pictured trawling the internet, washing the dishes, shaving, eating. The unremarkableness of these scenes however is what makes them interesting. In the often lonely, banalness of everyday life, we recognize ourselves and in Rebecca’s figures we see our own experiences illustrated.
Rebecca is currently a student at Yale University. Her chief media are oil paint and gouache. Her work is quirky, irreverent, moody. But the sad internet girl visual vocabulary is underpinned by a quiet activism. Rebecca’s art gets straight to the heart of being young today, urgently questioning, uncomfortable, wanting better and more.
