Grossman Gallery’s multi-artist exhibition of Lafayette College Capstone students. Regan Kinney: “It’s just in your head”
Kinney’s exhibition “It’s just in your head” includes two distressing self-portraits that explore the gruesome experience of depression through an intimate lens. With acrylic paint the artist magnifies her anguish and solidarity. She is alone in the two paintings, cloaked with a veil of darkness. The two paintings hung side by side and equal in their large scale are a horrifyingly emotional sight.
The first painting illustrates the artist in a moment of chaotic emotional distress. The disturbing confrontational nature of the painting is a forceful gesture to address the ugliness of depression. The sheer agony of the artist is clearly noted by the tears streaming down her pained visage. In the second painting, the edges of the canvas make up the sides of a box that the artist is trapped in. She is naked and vulnerable. Even though she is confined in isolation, in a space that has forcibly contorted her body, she is still. The artist is not attempting to escape the space but instead has accepted her fate in the solitude that she has always known.
Kinney’s method of painting herself with such precision presents a paradox to the eye. On the one hand, the emotional state that she is in in both paintings is one of great weight and pain. But on the other hand, that emotional state is not represented through her brush strokes, but instead, the artist takes great care in detailing every inch of the paintings, ultimately freezing each of her tortured moments in time. Kinney took great consideration in the style of brush strokes she implored in these paintings. She painted these introspective moments with such care and detail to represent a faction of her struggles – Kinney constantly conceals her mental imperfections through illustrating her life through a flawless lens.
The subject of mental illness is often avoided, and depression is seriously misunderstood and stigmatized. As a result, it is easier for people to act as if their love ones are fine and that there is nothing wrong. Kinney paints herself in a vulnerable state to break the silence that surrounds depression. She uses her own personal psychological battle to address that having depression is not something that’s “just in your head” or a reflection of self-pity, ungratefulness, and laziness that it is so often stigmatized as. In addition to addressing the misconceptions of depression, these paintings criticize the expectations of keeping up appearances that the artist personally struggles with. Every day Kinney presents herself as a happy joyful person with a perfect life. That façade of perfection is also reflected in her previous works that include colorful and joyful images. Kinney paints these self-portraits to break through those appearances and bravely reveal her chaotically ugly interior that she often shields from the outside world.
