ABOUT
Aubrey Learner is a visual artist living and working in San Francisco. She holds a BS in Biology from the University of Akron and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been shown in the Bay Area as well as Los Angeles, Miami and New York.
PRESS LINKS
PUBLICATIONS
-"Contemporary Water color, rewriting a bad wrap." Watercolor Magazine. 2012
-Studio Visit Magazine- Vol 15. 2011
-Orion Magazine. Sept/ October Issue 2011
PRESENTATIONS
ARTIST STATMENT
"Just as the pleasure of sex for the female body comes with the promise of the pain of childbirth, my drawings are metaphors of desire and disgust. I am inspired by the mother archetype, by the primordial workings of the biological clock, and the anxiety of the human animal as it tries to be both wild and time.
I use biological subjects, as observed from the detatched and clinical view of scientific illustration, that represent the reproductive cycle- mating insects, eggs, and larvae- as well as those that represent torture to and control over the body- sliced flowers, pills, and surgical instruments- which are then arranged into larger compositions of monstrous faces or patterns. Subjects appear pinned and dominated just as the paper is stretched, stapled, and left raw. The absence of ground is also suggestive of tattoo flash, making the stretched paper into a skin-substitute that is teased by surgical steel and insects alike.
My aim is to create a visceral, haptic experience in the viewer, and as the artist-observer, to dominate my own anxieties regarding the experience of being a female in modern society with all of it’s pheromones, pains and wildness."