Michaela Yearwood-Dan. After Euphoria

About

Michaela Yearwood-Dan’s work reflects on subjectivity and individual identity as forms of self-determination. Through painting, she explores how selfhood and personal experience – especially love and loss – marks of existence – constitute a vital and highly personal process of self-historicization vis-à-vis identity formation. 

'After Euphoria' draws heavily on the vicissitudes of her own romantic life – past and present - exploring what the artist calls the ‘bitter-sweet reality’ that arrives in the aftermath of heightened emotion and connectivity. Yet the artist also coheres an analogy between falling in and out of love with the mutability of contemporary experience that is desirous of advancement but marked by crisis and change. But what occurs at the end of all these entanglements – amorous or political? Yearwood-Dan proposes a rosy perspective of nostalgia that gives way - starkly and inevitably - to a sudden realisation of disillusionment; that all is not what it's cracked up to be or was. The works in this exhibition explore the awareness of the hues and textures of that epiphany. 

“I think the second I stopped trying to hide behind how a feminist, millennial, black woman should be and the goals they should attain I felt the load lift of my shoulders and found the ability to make the most honest work I could make,” says Yearwood-Dan.