Ariel Oakley
Instagram: @arieloakleystudio
Website: https://arieloakley.com
Bio: Ariel Oakley is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California.
She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and her MFA in Studio Art at Maryland Institute College of Art. She spends her days as a nurse in surgery at Keck Hospital of USC, where her passion for open-heart surgery continues to inform her art.
Statement: Consider your lungs, the mechanism by with you share in the intermingled breath of the world, pulling air into your body so that oxygen can be diffused into your blood. The broad blue sky brought into your deepest recesses. Your blood blooms from a deep garnet to a bright vermillion at its touch.
And it is in this breath, this shared breath, that my current body of work began.
Surgically assisting in a routine organ procurement, I held the icy lungs of our braindead patient and wondered: What is death if parts of us go on living?
I began painting bodies, using my surgical understanding of anatomy, looking for the edge of our being. My making lead me into a porosity of being, the overlapping of self and biome, the entanglement of matter and desire. My painting practice draws heavily from late medieval European icon painting traditions, paired with contemporary microscopy, medical scans and surgical illustrations. Layering an collaging chimeric beings of more than human entanglements. Mixing microbes and angels, my works struggle with the fundamental questions of what it means to be human, to be embodied, and to be conscious.
My works envision an earthly Eden of the sensuous body. The living gestures of aliveness between the minute multitudes of sensuous bodies that make up each of our bodies. This work rejects a heavenly answer to our mortal toil, whispering instead: what if? What if? What if? What if the body is the soul?
