Gaby Collins-Fernandez

"Good Girls is an image of my mother and my grandmother. What I liked about this photo is that my grandmother is kind of vamping for the image and then my mother is very unfiltered, doing what kids do in front of a camera. Kids do this less now because they are so used to cell phones and being themselves images, but in the 50s when that picture was taken my mother was not thinking about herself and having to present her own image. She is just smiling whereas my grandmother is obviously trying to look good in a distinctly feminine way." - Gaby Collins-Fernandez

"The imagery in the painting is an old photograph of my grandmother and my mother. I started with that image which was one that spoke out to me for both being pretty specific in the sense that I recognize my mom and my grandmother, but it's also a generic family photograph. I was really interested in how much my mothers face looks like my face and how my grandmother’s image looks like she's really playing it up for the camera. She’s dressed up and in makeup so I was really interested in this intimate connection between women where the way that they’re represented is actually quite different in terms of the consciousness around the gaze and the camera and a kind of performance." - Gaby Collins-Fernandez

"This image is one that I had kicking around for a while. I manipulated it in Photoshop and introduced some painterly elements into it. I then printed it onto terry cloth, primed with a clear primer, and went into it again with oil paint. I was thinking a lot about a hug in a box and how the mother figures countenance could be this sort of exploding firework, zombie apocalypse gaze." - Gaby Collins-Fernandez