* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Adrian Cox is a painter based in St. Louis, MO. He earned a BFA in painting from the University of Georgia and an MFA in studio art from Washington University in St. Louis.
Adrian explains the work by saying, “My work weaves a narrative of transgressive embodiment and builds a mythos of the grotesque. The characters in these paintings obliterate the natural limits of the body; sensuous extensions and wound-like openings facilitate an intense connection to their environment. I call these figures Border Creatures, as they are defined by such shifting and indeterminate boundaries. The environment in which these Border Creatures live implicitly becomes a borderland, an interstitial space that holds conflicting qualities in equilibrium. Rather than serving as a wellspring of identity for my characters, the landscape is shown to be as mutable as its inhabitants. The primal savagery of the wild forest becomes the museum diorama, the anthropological display, and a stage built from historical conventions. The resulting narrative is one of malleable embodiment, in which the qualities that we perceive as essential to identity are but temporary modes that shift within changing contexts.”