Mona Marshall

Recently the dissonance of my own life and the larger world has become increasingly apparent. As if a mirror to my thoughts, the “skin” of my drawings, the encaustic paint, became less dominant while the under paint asserted itself. The nature of the medium that I am using, a layer of wax hiding the under painting, led me to think of the duality of our public and private lives.

I chose the title, Skin Deep, because so much of what we experience in our lives is a fabrication constructed from, and simultaneously masking, an invisible infrastructure. Much of what we believe to be reality hides the labor and environmental costs that make our comforts possible. Skin Deep alludes to the corporeal. Skin, like paper, may be fragile and easily torn or cut. It is generated by what is underneath, and can be destroyed by it as well.

Mona Marshall is an artist currently living in Texas. She works in encaustic on a prepared surface and photography. She has an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She also studied at Tyler School of Art in Rome and the University of Michigan. She has exhibited work in San Francisco, Santa Monica, Viridian Gallery in New York, Blue Star in San Antonio, Harris Gallery in Houston, Women and Their Work Gallery in Austin, and the Austin Museum of Art. In 2003, she won first prize in Celebrating Texas Art in Houston. Marshall has won four residencies at the MacDowell Colony and was recently a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. She is a Professor of Visual Art at College of the Mainland near Houston, and just became a Master Naturalist in Austin, Texas.