Denise Ramos & Tricia Moreau Sweeney

Two Houston artists, Denise Ramos and Tricia Moreau Sweeney created paintings and photographs for an exhibition titled Artificial Light on view at Women & Their Work through August 3rd.

Denise Ramos’s paintings, deceptively simple and minimally composed, pack a transcendent visual punch. Her paintings were initially inspired and created as a means to illustrate another one of her loves: music. A musician in her own right, Ramos painted what she felt when playing her guitar. The eye-popping and luminous monochromes looked like vibrating sound on the walls. Ramos stated, “my paintings represent light…I try to capture the vibrations depicted in sound, nature, and artificial light.”

Ramos, injured in an automobile accident in high school, paints from her wheelchair. She chose to hang her works at the level from which she paints. While unorthodox compared to most gallery installations, this arrangement made the paintings more accessible. The difference between the hanging of this work and the others made a significant statement.

Tricia Moreau Sweeney’s paradoxical photographs captured glowing light and overwhelming darkness in family narratives. Generally set in what appeared to be a typical backyard or household interior, often depicting the actions of a young housewife and her small child, these pictures were layered with complicated meaning. Sweeney stated “nostalgic childhood fantasies, nightmares and obsessions fascinate me…through the process of re-evaluating my own childhood and investigating media-related domestic abuse…my photographs suggest fictional psychological narratives.”