Monica is an artist and educator based in New York and Connecticut. Since 2000, she has taught architecture, design, visual art, and digital media at the high school and college levels. 

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"I draw on abstract painted fields. My work fluctuates between disfiguration and figuration, and familiar objects oscillate between layered fields. The picture plane is amassed to create spatial amplification and zones of deletion."  

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The Erasure series of paintings represents figures and characters first generated in a sketchbook that serve as starting points for more complex visual constructions. These initial sketches are transformed through layering, redaction, and re-contextualization, resulting in compositions that navigate the boundaries between legibility and abstraction.

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The work engages with the politics of form, using dense accumulations of gesture and chromatic contrast to complicate figure-ground relationships. Thick contour lines simultaneously delineate and destabilize, asserting the presence of form while enacting its erasure. This tension generates a visual terrain where the narrative is neither fixed nor fully knowable.

Invented species and speculative figures emerge at the intersection of structure and dissolution, often shaped by strategies reminiscent of architectural figure-ground studies. These forms resist categorical identity, operating as fluid, open-ended, and unresolved visual propositions.

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Primary colors punctuate the canvas, creating moments of vibrance that both structure and interrupt the composition. Their presence guides the viewer’s eye across the surface while refusing to offer cohesion or closure.

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Erasure is not a negation but a generative force—a method of re-seeing, re-making, and refusing the finality of form. This project contributes to a broader dialogue around the politics of representation, abstraction, and the body. By embracing erasure as an act of making rather than negation, the work proposes an alternative way of seeing—one that holds space for contradiction, fragmentation, and uncertainty.

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The species work utilizes concepts derived from observations that demonstrate biological systems. Projects are grown into architectonic composites that generate hyper-articulated forms and spatial fields. The species' work is grown through varied aggregation at multiple scales. The objective is the production of new organisms and organizational methods that represent morphogenetic evolutionary traits. 

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The photography captures spontaneous moments, performances, and atmospheric conditions. Portraits are unposed and reflect the space and time they occupy.

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Education: Bachelor of Architecture, Cooper Union, Masters of Advanced Architectural Design, Columbia University.

CTE UC Berkeley Extension, Teaching Credential California: Architecture/Engineering, Arts/ Media. 

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