Red Room

Oil on canvas.

Through this series of room interiors, I want to emulate feelings of confinement, loneliness, and curiosity, and to explore the psychology of architecture, specifically through the lens of liminal space. Each interior approaches an intensely contrasting and suffocatingly narrow hallway at the farthest distance from the viewer. The first thing you see, from the audience's perspective, is the way out—vis-à-vis the hallway—and then you notice the walls materialize and close in on you. I try to blur the line between representational and abstract space by playing with color and value. Vibrating and vanishing color boundaries differently affect the converging shapes that make up each interior, fighting the illusion of three dimensionality and providing different types of psychological weight. The crown molding in each room acts in opposition as a key by which a three dimensional perspective can be reoriented. This back and forth gives each room its own fluctuating persona.

By Jake Jorgl