These paintings explore complex and vital relationships
between humans and animals, and offer an immersion into
beauty, the erotic, and temporality, where figures engage in
exchanges of humor, shamanic transference and intimacy as
peers, co-conspirators, paramours, family members and
thespians.
Animal characters function on several levels in these works.
They are avatars – the manifestation of a deity in bodily form;
incarnate and embodied, expressions of a person, an
emotion, or an idea. They are always close by as the Friend or
the Familiar. I also point to our interrelationship with animals,
our shared sentience, origins, and futures. Their fate will be
ours and our fate will be theirs, particularly in relation to the
climate crisis, global deforestation, and species extinction.
Each piece in this series is a self-portrait which engages
strongly with the collective and personal unconscious.
The works would be incomplete without representations of my
Jewish ancestral identity and traditions. The Hebrew
iconography in Everything You Need includes representations
of biomorphic menorahs, Hebrew pottery and oil lamps, and
repetitive lines suggestive of the lines on a tallis (prayer shawl).
The question is raised as to why a Jewish woman artist would
choose to paint openly eroticized work including the
representation of a nude female figure juxtaposed with sacred
Jewish objects. The poetic structure of the ways in which I
combine these fragments to create novel constructs is itself a
form of abstraction, and it honors the complexity of the
experience of the divine as well as the impossibility of defining
it with reductive clarity.
The erotic and the sensual emerge in these paintings, not
separate from but intrinsic to the expansive ecosystem which
is sentient life, while the female experience in its depth and
breadth play a primary role. The characters in the series
engage in a highly physical expression of exchange with the
Other, as lover, mother, friend, and intrigue, swimming and
wallowing in that dance, that puddle.
In “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, Audre Lorde
refers to a sense of deep satisfaction, beyond the sexual
deceptively portrayed in the pornographic – elevated by a
profound feeling that lives in the joy and fulfillment of a
woman’s being.
This is the embodiment and lived experience of the women in
Everything You Need.
Artist Bio:
Ketzia Schoneberg is a contemporary mixed media artist. Her intimate works explore movement, temporality, color, pattern and form, while navigating relationships between identity, culture, and eroticism within an internal landscape. She is inspired by the liminal space between the human and animal worlds, as well as by natural history. Her work often exists within a historical framework and from a feminist perspective.
The experience of Beauty, the portrayal of alliance, and sometimes humor are common themes in the artist’s work. Ketzia’s use of color is informed by emotional pitch in the moment of working, and mark-making is essential to her narratives as a conveyance of candor.
A 4th generation artist, Schoneberg is a prolific artist, whose expressive style is primitive and engaging.
Figurative and abstract elements, vivid color and loose mark making are hallmarks of her figurative expressionist style. The artist uses acrylic paint, graphite, pastel, charcoal and wax pencil on paper, board and canvas in her works. Ketzia’s process is intuitive and loose, often influenced by the palette, materials and imagery that are close at hand in the moment.
Schoneberg’s work is exhibited in museums and galleries nationally, and her paintings are collected throughout the U.S. and Canada. Born in Los Angeles, the artist grew up in San Francisco and is currently living and working in the Pacific Northwest.
www.ketzia.com
IG: @ketziaschoneberg
