Tasha Depp

Tasha Depp’s three-dimensional paintings are conversations between real life and representation, predictability and chance, priorities and play. Borrowing from trompe l’oeil techniques, decorative folk art tole painting, and the European fine arts tradition, Depp  paints her subjects precisely and with such attention that her accurate paintings deceive the eye. She depicts the details of prosaic objects on random substrates: an Apple charger balances on a shattered car bumper, wild brambles crackle on a fiberglass shard, and an acrylic carpet dissolves into a struggle with nature itself. With deft Old Master brushwork, Depp transforms an assortment of plastic and metal detritus giving them new life as archival surfaces. These discarded relics of consumerism lend a texture and humility that makes the work accessible and, at times, quite humorous. Her ironic pairing of random plastics with exquisitely painted imagery of people, places, and things, conceptually probes mythic dichotomies of contemporary American life: work and play, have and have-nots, nature and trash as well as the contradictions between low brow and high art. Celebrating the endless diversity of experience, Tasha Depp invites us into an equanimous realm where the random and the antithetical can still make poetry together.

                    --Eva Melas and Paula Lalala curators for Tasha Depp:Upstate Lost and Found