Apocrypha

2021. Oil on canvas. 18" x 24"
Apocrypha is a surrealist oil painting meant to explore the relationship between academic access and income inequality. The setting of this painting is based on one of the hallways inside Evans Library, which draws attention to the fact that 59 percent of Texas A&M’s students come from families in the top 20 percent (according to The Equality of Opportunity Project). I portray this situation using aspects of liminal horror. This painting illustrates both the gatekeeping of academia with the classist and stereotypical notions of the uneducated as “uncivil” and deserving of exclusion rather than being a product of their disadvantaged environment. Liminal spaces are considered uncanny as they’re meant to be transitional states between the concepts of beginning and end. This reflects the limbo that low-income people have to face when confronted with the reality that an education is a gateway to class mobility and that they need to be affluent enough to afford it in the first place. This dissuades most people and feeds into the negative feedback loop of generational poverty