Renée Bouchard Artist Statement 2020 “If we look at looking too long, it falls apart. Underneath the benign surface of the orderly world is the ‘optical unconscious,’ a deceptive, fragmentary domain that has to be forcibly reconstituted in order to make daily sense.” James Elkins I intersect child rearing and art making as a form of resistance to the long held suppression of unwaged mothers and artists. Since my 7 year old son was a toddler, he often has been invited to participate with me in the studio. I see children’s art as the earliest and most abstract search for language. Within the performative moments of our collaborations I constantly (re) construct my relationship with visual culture, woman’s work, and my most intimate self. Escaping the confines of one reality and entering an alternate reality is often where I find freedom within the complexity of the mind and the emotions it houses. I use titles to constrain the viewer within my abstract, representational paintings. Color for me is the machine that organizes the movement within the space. I use the color wheel to juxtapose pleasure and the abject with ideas of power and freedom from the perspective of a woman. I work in spurts on several paintings simultaneously in a journalistic manner, documenting clusters of daily life. Language, media, music, and studio detritus weave together with memory and the present act of painting. “Forever – is composed of Nows.” Emily Dickinson