Opal Mae Ong is a Filipino-American artist living and working on Lenape Land in Brooklyn, New York. The artist lives in a neighborhood between Prospect Park and Greenwood Cemetery. Their most current body of work is informed by getting lost here, surviving, and holding space between life and death. Because of this, Ong’s work draws on a felt response to the natural world and an innate reverence for the otherworldly.
Ranging in scale, the paintings and drawings conjure scenes where mythic, feminine characters crawl towards horizons, contort to fountains, commune with flora, carry moons and collapse into rest.
Ong’s palette evokes our liminal times of day: dawn, dusk and night. It’s here where fog prevents the figures from making haste. In spite of these conditions, they move with a blind sense of trust through the haze of landscapes, architectural boundaries, borders, and somehow they persist and weather the day.
Over the course of several weeks, the artist constructs, deconstructs and reconstructs their paintings. These decisions evolve from intentionally sensing through materials. In making, unmaking, and remaking – both paintings and drawings – Ong works through personal loss. For the artist, their daily studio practice is a portal that allows for a deep material engagement with ongoing and ever-changing bardos.
*bardos in reference to The Tibetan Book of the Dead
