Jane Ann McKay - Rituals
https://janemckay.weebly.com/
My name Jane McKay (she/her), I'm a East County San Diego native artist who is currently working in the bay area and attending UC Berkeley for Art Practice. My focuses are illustration, painting, and writing. Most of my work revolves around my own personal experiences and processes around the subject of the femme and queer identity, class inequalities and my cultural upbringing. I find that I like my work to function not as a representation of my experiences, but a documentation of reflection and growth.
Artist Statement:
These pieces document and commemorate moments of ritual and everyday life in the poor white “redneck” community of my hometown. It is not condemning, criticizing or romanticising this life, simply documenting it as it was, dirty, tacky, loving and warm. This series came about from photos I was taking while visit home after the death of my father, culminating in the night my family and I burned my father’s bed frame and toasted a shot of tequila to a man who died of alcoholism. It deserved to be depicted, commemorated, remembered, a ritual of respect that is all at once strange and off putting, but vindicating and truly mournful. The people depicted are at once anonymous and personable, these figures are not meant to be judged but joined, these are moments of joy, of community, of reality. You are not a voyeur but a guest at our table. There is beauty here, there is also poverty, there is pain and there is happiness, there is reality, and it deserves to be depicted, to be seen, and to be judged in all of its assets, thought about and not thrown away.
