Chasity Colón — Young Artist
Bio:
Chasity is a Nuyorican visual artist born and raised in Bushwick, Brooklyn in New York City. At a young age, she began drawing comics and creating her own worlds as an escape from the adversity present in her household. During high school, she was introduced to Fine Arts and utilized it as another way to pour her innermost feelings onto a two-dimensional format. Her current work primarily consists of still life paintings and drawings which combine symbolism for identity, self-expression, nostalgia, and feelings of melancholy.
She is currently represented by Viridian Artists in Chelsea, Manhattan as a Young Artist, and she was an artist in residence at the Carrie Able Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn during the summer of 2021. She graduated from Parsons School of Design with a BFA in Illustration. Outside of her visual arts projects, she enjoys singing and engaging in martial arts.
Artist Statement:
I believe that personal items have the ability to capture the essence of an individual, and even act as tangible connections to the past. They can represent “pieces” of someone’s overall life, containing stories that are linked to their identity, personal history, and deeply emotional experiences. My work comprises realistic, detailed paintings and drawings featuring some of my belongings as symbolic fragments of my personality, personal timeline, and navigation through life while dealing with mental illness. I include mostly items that are reminiscent of positive memories and representative of therapeutic self-expression, but with an element of melancholy. The small details represent how I interact with the environment in my daily life. I observe things very closely and try to appreciate the seemingly trivial details that come together to make up the whole (such as the stitches on a scarf or a little souvenir from a special trip). Each keepsake acts as a palpable existence of my past, helping me create a mental timeline of where and who I've been, what I’ve done, and how far I've come while enduring hardship.