Jasmine Skutela

My work interrogates tension between the illusion of control and the anxiety I experience in crowds. As a painter, I focus on depicting mass movements of people from one destination to another, emphasizing the unease I feel when walking among them or observing them. I often experience profound anxiety about making eye contact, fearing mutual acknowledgement.

My feeling of awareness about each person's struggles, joys and aspirations is overwhelming. In enclosed spaces like clubs or stadiums, I see the crowd as a unified 'hive mind' entity. Outdoors however, individuality and disparateness become strikingly apparent as people head in different directions with their own agenda. By deliberately omitting details of the individuals my paintings attempt to capture the unsettling physical nature of the crowd.