Tia Factor: (Harm)ony Cocoon

Artists

• Tia Factor

Statement

Factor’s work is concerned with the concept of topophilia or the emotional connections between the physical environment and human beings. She often incorporates the social element of interviewing others which becomes the jumping-off point for her paintings. She observes how people describe place, recording the distortions, emotions, projections, aspirations, or romanticized elements that come in to play when describing personal experiences of place. While referencing the tradition of historical landscape painting, often utilizing idyllic, romantic and pastoral imagery, Factor blurs the boundaries of representational space with a passion for abstraction and the physical gestures of painting itself.

Factor’s PDX Window Project, entitled (Harm)ony Cocoon, is a large-scale landscape painting glimpsed through rips and tears in a barrier covering the window of the project space.

The work reflects the common human impulse to dream-up a “better place” and turns a critical eye on our American culture that designs, manipulates, “imagineers”, and privatizes landscapes into places of fantasy and perfectionism. Using her experience in a gated community in Hawai’i to frame questions around the darker sides of utopia, Factor’s visual references derive from sources that range from neo- communal entities, lifestyle communities, gated communities and golf/leisure communities; they speak of luxury, leisure, excess and exclusivity while simultaneously hinting at a looming chaos in the form of ecological destruction and dwindling resources.