Cover Art: “Reflections and Projections”

"Reflections and Projections"
Medium: Oil Paint on Canvas

Artist Statement:

I began these paintings as a way of processing my grief, my inherited grief, where did this start, where does it come from?  

Exploring the intergenerational impacts of my grandmother’s suicide from the perspective of a granddaughter who never met her, exploring and building a narrative using secondary sources, this forming of a person and bringing her to existence felt vital to understanding and accepting myself completely. 

I start by painting from memory, inventing composition from a story before my time or an early childhood emotion. I revisit my own traumas. I put myself in the shoes of my ancestors and visualize them during their most formative experiences. I do this to find forgiveness for them. For everything.  And in this I find forgiveness for myself. The painting records the story. 

I leave holes from underlayers that suggest more to know hidden underneath, perhaps lost – a longing, always, for more.

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Devon Midori Hale is a visual artist based in Seattle, Washington. Her work explores civic, racial, and personal identity through the lens of intergenerational experience. Looking at the persistence of history in our present moment, she combines symbols of immortality and the past with the subtle intrusions of an observer from the present. In addition to painting solo in a studio, her practice often extends to working on community-based and public artworks that often include interdisciplinary collaboration. Often these projects draw imagery from within the psyche, allowing bits and pieces of objects, places, and memories to shape an abstract narrative.