Artist Email: domalley@cca.edu
Artist Website: www.danielleardenomalley.net
Medium: muralist, painting, drawing, textile, woodwork, play structure, community arts/teaching
Artist Statement
Influenced by decay, folklore, magic, and femininity, Danielle O’Malley’s work creates and describes a society of fictional creatures, their morals, and their relationship to themselves and their world. This parallel universe explores ideas of utopias, dystopias and the fusion of the seemingly opposite. Themes of innocence and childhood create a Disneyesque hyperreality, where sugarcoated representations make failed attempts to mask macabre undertones. And in the decay and macabre, nuanced beauties are born. A world turned upside down, conflictions coming, invisible borders blur, and new realms of possibilities are birthed.
Based upon philosophies in contemporary physics, which believe if we were to create our very own big bang, this baby universe would not take over ours, but create its very own space within the confines of our own. Are humans their own tiny universe and do we have an ability to create our own personal space, our own world, by how we perceive reality and how we influence those around us?
Reveling in the hidden layers of reality, which exist in the absence, the feeling, and intuition, Danielle’s dimensions twist the semantics that shape our realities, configuring a certain nihilistic magic and existential power. Thus examining, what is reality, and do we contain the power to change it.
Danielle O’Malley is a mixed media artist, based out of Oakland, California. Since graduating from the California College of the Arts in 2010, she has exhibited internationally, from the Long Island Children’s Museum to Islington Mill in Manchester, England. She currently runs an Etsy shop, called Filth Cakes, out of her West Oakland Home.