I am an artist and college art instructor working and living in Colorado. My work primarily centers around two different subjects - landscapes and figurative images.

monica deming

figurative images

My figurative work deals with the transience of memory - and how undependable our memories are. Over the years I have discovered that many of my memories I thought I held are not my own - they are recounts of stories I have heard, old photographs I have seen, things others have described to me. I have simply adopted them into my own consciousness to be used for my own purposes. This is especially true of memories of my childhood. Many things I remember from my childhood are actually someone else's memories. Because of this I have difficulty with the big picture. My own memory works in snippets, mental photos of things that have happened - images lacking in background information and cohesiveness. I gather things to reassemble them. Everything I create is an attempt to relive this information - to share it hoping to gain insight on what is real - and whether anything actually belongs to me.

landscapes

My landscape work strives to awaken within the viewer an awareness of our relationship to the land and the people who work and live in such places. It is incredibly easy for us to go to Google Maps and see anywhere we want without a connection to the people who live there - the people who populate the spaces and live their lives in the maps we see. This seems especially true of the agricultural regions of our country - places people travel through on their way to get somewhere else. I would like viewers to realize that agriculture and the land are of tremendous importance to all of us - part of our history and our future. That we need to care for the land and respect it - that the fields deserve as much respect as the mountains and cities that people love so much.