Tara O’Gorman

Tara O’Gorman is a Southern California based painter, and received her BFA in spring of 2020 from CSU Long Beach’s Drawing and Painting program. In her current body of work she is interested in narrative figure painting, utilizing humor and irony, overabundance of detail, and fusing imagination with reality to enhance mundane domestic settings and serve as social commentary. When she isn’t in the studio, she is focused on collaborating with her peers to create opportunities and events for emerging artists and their communities within Ventura and Los Angeles County.

I create multi-figurative narrative paintings, often derived from my personal experiences to celebrate and critique certain behaviors, beliefs, and obsessions associated with middle-class society, witnessed in my own life or as portrayed in media outlets. Typically set in familiar domestic environments, I seek to elevate my subjects’ mundane status by constructing fantastical scenes, creating humorous and clichéd situations; rendered with a copious amount of detail. I’m interested in conveying the disparities between the main subjects' dull reality and their escapist interests by juxtaposing the literal world with a dream-like representation of their obsessions. I take moments from my personal life that are common, iconic experiences and integrate broad social commentary in hopes that my viewers will see how people are connected by shared obsessions while living as distinct individuals. My goal is to shift one’s view of the ordinary, to look more critically at it and notice what is amusing and absurd in the banality of life.