BIO
Danae Lenda is 25 year old artist working in San Francisco. She grew up on Cape Cod and moved to San Francisco in 2017 to attend the University of San Francisco as an art history major and fine arts minor. She received her BA from the school in 2021. She received the Gloria Osuna Perez Award from the University of San Francisco in 2021 for her body of work showcased in the Thacher Annual Exhibition. Her work revolves around changing perceptions of identity, drawing from personal experiences and often responding to current events. While she mainly considers herself to be a painter, she also draws, prints, makes ceramics, and has experience with metalworking and graphic design. Her work has been exhibited throughout the city and she recently completed a three month long residency with The Midway Gallery in 2023.
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STATEMENT
My work explores how we create and perform our identities in the age of social media. As a kid I performed literally, dancing for my family at dinner, distracting them from the fact that I couldn’t contribute to their conversation about Bush’s islamophobic new policy or how the new DiVinci Code movie wasn’t as good as the book. At school I performed the “role model,” terrified that one day my teachers would find out that in actuality I am crass and loud and I’d come tumbling down from that pedestal on which they placed me. These days, I play the part of the peacekeeper saying, “no worries, it’s totally fine” (with two exclamation points), unbothered, and getting along with everyone, always. I perform my femininity, being gracious, palatable, and easy-going. When I paint, I don’t have to perform. I am alone, messy, my body contorted into strange positions to work the paint from the right angle. I present my work without the fear that it will be disliked, confident enough to let the work speak for itself. The idea of performance, however, continues to influence my artwork.
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Growing up in the age of social media, we are constantly curating our lives, performing it for others, and watching it back at the end of the day. We perform our identities, showing others who we believe we are, reposting the social and political causes we believe in, untagging ourselves from photos where we don’t look our best, and curating our feeds with the photos of celebrities we want to emulate, meals we want to cook, and places we hope to travel. Upon first viewing my work, you might not realize that there are such dystopian themes at play, with my utilization of bright colors and crisp, clean lines. I draw from trends I see online, riffing off pinterest-inspired mood boards, trendy aesthetics, and today’s “selfie culture.” I am curious about the way we use the internet and the globalization of culture to find ourselves and present ourselves to the world. I am also curious about the way our efforts to perform our identities online put us in boxes. My generation seems to crave a break with the binary, carving out new spaces and identities for themselves. However, I sometimes wonder whether we are just creating new barriers between ourselves and creating smaller boxes to put ourselves in. I take on these issues in my work, painting people, scenes, and themes that I know, contemplating the way appearances are not always what they seem.