Mona Pollard is a visual artist with a preference for painting and drawing. Her early works were self-referential dependent on the female form. Challenging the linguistic code of the word feminine and women’s sexuality led to an exploration to reinvent the viewer’s perspective. Her investigation of the ambiguity of body representation was to include gendered spaces and societal conventions. Her approach utilizes descriptive marks noted as a woman’s touch, fragile and tentative, and temporal in nature. To transcend the very personal to a more universal representation, she distills the image into abstraction, felt but not necessarily seen. Recognition may or may not happen due to the degree of abstraction, allowing some perception to be tested. Currently working in acrylics, her application involves painting with gesso into drawn marks of charcoal, graphite or pastels, and drawing into wet paint. A significant point of departure, the process becomes more economical, alluding to a suppression of self. An intuitive journey that starts with familiar imagery becomes a system of panels and layering surface texture suggesting a deeper excavation of time. The implied grid and its rational order is supplanted with irrational emotive forces and the seductive medium of paint. Relying on these contradictions and reintroducing the figure in fragments, invites the viewer’s emotional connection and a continuum of the human experience.

Mona Pollard holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, with a concentration in painting and a Master of Arts in Graphic Communications from New York University, The Steinhardt School of Education. She works and resides in Red Bank, New Jersey.