Brittany Tucker
Emotional Outburst, 2021
Acrylic and spray paint on canvas
Courtesy of the Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles and the artist

The emotions in Brittany Tucker’s paintings are often manifested as interactions between her own realistically-rendered self-portrait and a second figure depicted as a cartoon. This clever technique underlines the difference between her vision of herself and the ideas about others that haunt her imagination and contribute to her perception of the world. The other figure is often an intrusive white man, or—as seen elsewhere in The Emotional Show—a Black woman. In Emotional Outburst she represents herself reacting directly to the traumatizing speed at which she (along with everyone else) was pressured to move forward through the perspective-shifting events of 2020. Other paintings in the same series are spray-painted with words like “riot,” “wild,” and “not OK.”
(DKS)