More than Skin Deep

The 13 paintings by Alyssa Monks on view at San Luis Obispo Museum of Art focus on the artist’s obsession with watery surfaces.

-  Meg Daly

Spanning two decades, the paintings in Be Perfectly Still, A Retrospective trace Monks’ stylistic developments as well as her inner world.

 “Alyssa Monks’ paintings capture something very essential about the human experience and which we can all relate to on some level,” says SLOMA chief curator Emma Saperstein. Monks’ figures are caught in moments of visceral and even disturbing rawness. In the title piece, Be Perfectly Still, a young woman sinks into a pool of clear slime. Or is she emerging? Her cupid lips suggest youthful sexuality. The painting begs a narrative and yet the artist offers no concrete storyline. The young woman could be drowning in her tears—her eyes and nose seem reddened. Or perhaps she is being born, going from child to woman, her gaze filled with a look of lost innocence.

If there is one thing Monks wants viewers to avoid is seeing her work as photorealistic. “When have you ever seen a photo like that?” she asks. Monks intentionally plays with people’s sense of

reality and recognition. “I like to turn that on its head and ask, ‘What is real?’” she says. “The brain’s job is to take shapes and colors and make sense of them. But it’s really a hallucination. It’s not perfect; there are mistakes.”