Tasha Kusama explores the projected self vs. reality in her striking oil paintings. Toying with dualities, the artist explores the soft and hard edges of coming of age in the current cultural landscape. The painter says these recent works are partly inspired by being a parent:
“As a mom of two teenage girls at this point in my life, I often try to imagine life through their eyes,” the artist says. “Life through selfies. Quantity over quality. Instant vs. delayed gratification. Yosemite vs. the mall. As we get more and more inundated with the STUFF of life, the hundreds of thousands of $2.80 jewelry pieces at Forever 21, the never ending abyss of images of the internet … I’m exploring what it is like to just BE in this time of ‘life online’– our projected selves. I am interested in the dichotomy of our inner life vs. our outer life.”
See more of her recent work below.
The oil paintings of 
In 
Nichole Rae Klein’s oil and egg tempera paintings blend ordinary beings and unearthly flourishes. Those timeless materials, in particular, add a tension to the artist’s scenes and portraits. The painter says her process is time consuming, but the “slowness provides me enough time to look around the scene and notice what my subject might have missed during their attempt to keep everything under control.”