Paintings by Steph C Cosby

b. 1975, Vitória, Brasil

Lives and works in Corvallis, Oregon, usa

My paintings dwell in the intersection between ecosystem relationship and ancestral, imaginal, subconscious realms that are instructional and healing. These are paintings that explore themes of life/death, displacement and loss of land, culture, community, family…paintings that are an act of resistance and a balm. Paintings as a form of care giving to self, possibly others. An artist’s response to inter-generational trauma, climate change, and the condemnation of tender, disabled, queer, neurodivergent, ‘mad’, and non-white beings. In conversation with Brazil’s mid-60’s art movement Tropicália, these paintings act as resistance to fa sc ism, and the cap it alist urge to exploit everything on the web of life, here on Earth, and in the universe/s beyond.

I like to think my first visual language came from the iron dust that rode in on light beams and salty ocean air, coating the home I was born into across the bay from the Port of Tubarão. I saw, smelled, felt, and tasted its bright, rusty particles as I crawled around exploring.

This iron oxide was formed alongside hematite, magnetite, and quartz in the “iron quadrangle” of Minas Gerais, Brasil and is heavily mined, without consent from local indigenous communities. I imagine that my ancestors reached me through this energetically rich iron dust and provided an initiation into the dreamworld where I receive inspiration for paintings, a world I can rely on for my own healing. The abstracted human forms, and some of the futurist stories I paint, come from this subconscious place. These forms, reminiscent of stones, are also painted with ochre pigments, a symbol of their origin story.

These abstracted human forms that I call “ochre bodies” center around the human body as a form in nature, a vessel, a place, a home. The abstraction helps me defy the confines of identity to hopefully make the stories more inclusive, as well as offer a participatory experience. It is the skill of empathy that allows those experiencing autobigraphical work to find meaning in others’ stories, but what about the painter who empathizes with the viewer/consumer of their art? What if I want to make my art, the expression of my experiences with being human, as accessible as possible to others? I needed to find a language I felt could offer this.

This continuing body of work is autobiographical, but it is also the response in a “call and response” relationship with the dream ﹌portal﹌place I was invited into by my ancestors, the gentle red dust.

2024