Complex Faces, 2022

Based in Detroit, the 25-year-old Indigenous Chamorro painter, Gisele McDaniel, projects community support through her painting "Complex Faces." McDaniel sees her work in layers: "The first layer is the relationship I have with the person, and the last layer is this protective voice to make sure they can speak for themselves." In this specific piece, McDaniel worked with oil on canvas, incorporating found objects, resin, and sound on a USB to go with her work. McDaniel incorporates nature into her painting and uses bright colors and textures to move the viewer's eyes to different places in the painting. The overarching message McDaniel is trying to convey in her painting(s) is respect for people who have been sexually assaulted. She transforms the stories of society members and paints them onto canvas. McDaniel says her work is not "things I create because I want to be a marketable artist. These are things I create because they're what I needed to heal all the trouble that living in this vessel has been". She uses her work to record, distribute, and expose things happening to the people around her. Over the past two years, the pandemic has flooded our society with worries. Ultimately, McDaniel's work exposes its viewers to other hardships happening in addition to COVID-19 by displaying a different type of suffering. The CDC promoted us to go about our days while respecting our communities. We quarantined if we were exposed, socially distanced, and wore masks when outside the house. McDaniel replicates this community support by giving a voice to sexual assault survivors to enlighten others about problems happening in the community. In her artist statement, McDaniel is characterized as a survivor herself, which is why she aims to allow other women to feel comfortable sharing their stories. The painting "Complex Faces" incorporates symbolically significant objects that have meaning to the women in the painting. By combining the subjects' voices and some of their things, McDaniel creates a medium for survivors to share their stories and heal. McDaniel's artwork further allows audience members to empathize and experience what these women in the painting withstood. 
 

I first came across McDaniel when I conducted a general Instagram search for "Michigan Art." The keyword prompted me to scroll through many paintings, some having no connection to Michigan. Along with others in my gallery, this painting grasped my attention of its aesthetically pleasing depiction of scenes incorporating nature and inside life. Specifically, the oriental rug paired with a grand chair and slouchy orange couch, set in an arrangement of plants and weeds, creates the illusion of the inside world coming outside. The setting of the painting also reflects the story that McDaniel is expressing, bringing the unknown to the public eye. Her subjects reflect on their experiences in America dealing with gender inequality and abuse. During the pandemic, people suppressed these stories and replaced them with COVID-19 information.
 

McDaniel finds a way to express the stories of others through her paintings to make people aware of the hardships being faced by many female, transgender, and non-binary individuals who do not have the space, energy, or resources to express themselves. Another theme that McDaniel's painting exposes is the idea of not knowing where you fit in. For example, one girl in the painting is the first American citizen in her family. She struggles with her American identity, African identity, and African American identity. With most of her family in Kenya, she has a hard time forming concrete identities because being a part of different cultures has a loss of identity. This connection is what the subjects long for, and you can see this from the multiple faces on the couch. These faces are representative of the subject's mothers and their disconnect from their daughters' bodies. The mothers cannot identify with their daughters and vice versa because they come from two completely different cultures and do not have a solid understanding of the other's identity. The faces also represent the abuse of women's bodies and the fact that women are not always seen as equals to men. McDaniel highlights the misogynistic society that she and others live through. Finally, this painting shows the frustrations of living in today's society as a woman through their hyper-sexualized depiction. The subjects sit in a powerful position on their "thrones" in lingerie-like clothing, barely covering their bodies. The subjects are tired of their abuse being seen as their fault, where they are either not friendly or not as nice as men think they should be, and living in a world where violence towards women is standard. McDaniel projects women's feelings and hopes to remove the idea of sexualized women deserving violence. Ultimately, this painting, the recording, and the decorative attachments all come together to voice that even though individually, you are a tiny part of the world, you still can learn and change, and people continuously refuse. McDaniel puts the facts in front of her viewers, so they have no other option but to accept other people's situations.