Amellia Hausmann

I’m interested in the everyday and the overlooked. Those dusty photos you come across in a thrift store of strangers posing for family photos, chatting on their front porch, or sitting around a dinner table reveal our innate human connection and shared experiences. These frozen moments are normal, repetitive, and even boring, but it’s where our lives happen which is what makes them so intriguing to me. In my paintings, I capture the small gestures; the glances across a room, the awkward gaps between people in a group, and the conversations mid-sentence that I’ll never be able to hear from people I’ll never know. Like watching a person from a distance or studying a photograph, we inevitably fill in gaps and create narratives that might differ entirely from reality. This is what happens in my work—the figures become familiar yet undefined, fading in and out of understanding as if they’re a memory. 

 

I approach the figures in my work with spontaneous and intuitive mark-making; continuously pushing and pulling between representation and abstraction. This ambiguity invites viewers to experience the same tension between a feeling of familiarity and a feeling of mystery that first draws me to these scenes, allowing them to view these moments through their own lens of understanding.