Paintings Drawings Constructions

Speed says she’s not that good of a painter, yet. Combining art-historical references such as Botticelli and Mantegna, religious and sexual iconography and folk-art flatness, she constructs open-ended narratives that vacillate between the ominous and hilarious. Extremely sophisticated naiveté and infinitely wrought detail coalesce to create para-real works where the grand dragon of the KKK crosses the River Styx on his way to Hell, the clitoris is a persistent enigma and insects and allusions to fire abound. An eerily off-kilter third-eye conveys several different expressions on a face at the same time, suggesting that we are constantly thinking about more than one thing, that the nature of reality is constantly shifting. And, her deft rendering suggest that she is one helluva painter.