Artificial Interiors

Artificial Interiors is a series of intimately scaled paintings that depict dramatically lit domestic interiors. My limited yet saturated color palette creates a dark atmosphere that feels both strange and familiar, contributing to the unsettling ambiance of the domestic scenes. Their origins in Artificial Intelligence (AI) prompts further reinforce this effect. Each painting begins as a composite collage created with AI-generated images, iterative prompts, and Photoshop, in a process that creates fantasy spaces, detached from real ones, even as their elements - sofas, chairs, corners, stairs - suggest common expectations and experiences for domestic life in the U.S. These digitally assembled spaces are then physically translated into oil paintings, allowing me to work through emotions of fear, security, and control. The resulting interiors feel at once familiar and unknowable, believable and impossible. Their constrained light sources, limited palette, and strange compositional hierarchies contribute to a sense of temporal displacement - of a moment that can’t quite be placed. Although the spaces are empty of human figures, they imply inhabitants. Viewers are invited to either observe the rooms at a distance or step into them, projecting their own memories, associations, and emotional landscapes. Growing up in a household where visibility often meant vulnerability, I turned inward, seeking refuge in environments where I had full autonomy. These imagined interiors reflect that need for solitude and safety while also giving form to the contradictions of trauma: the blurring of fear and comfort, of presence and absence. Artificial Interiors is grounded in painting as a physical and vulnerable act. The process of translating digitally constructed interiors into deeply personal oil paintings allows me to explore memory, imagination, and interiority through the language of light, color, and materiality. Advisor: Aaron Holz