Tori Pounds

Tori Pounds (b.1995) is an English painter based in Mexico City. Her works encounter ideas of ecology and the collateral damage of an anxious society, looking closely at what follows after the extinction of the human species and what might be left behind. She completed her BFA at the Academie Minerva in Groningen, the Netherlands (2017), further studying painting at Hunter College in New York City. Afterwards she travelled and worked in various veterinary hospitals as a theatre auxiliary, becoming intrigued by the varied modern relationships between man and animal, before coming back to her art discipline and working professionally in her San Miguel Chapultepec studio in Mexico City for the last two years. In 2021, Pounds has shown at Zona Maco Fair, Mexico as well as galleries such as Galeria Hilario Galguera and JO-HS.

In the artists works, animals are painted as disguised childhood toys, food or as insects collaged with surgical equipment. Combined with the random everyday object these elements suggest a surreal existence and ask deeper questions about reality and human behaviour. Techniques of realistic oil painting are used with contradicting bright and plastic colours alongside a mix of smooth and defined brush strokes the paint forms a falsified world. Playing with consumer products, bloody organs and exaggerated food she provokes a political and social conversation, careful not to ever show the whole human figure but rather elements such as the hands, however they are hidden in latex gloves or animated. She uses a mix of sources such as her own veterinary photos or digitally collaged images found online that she finds have a strong comical appeal and painterly quality, such as sources from A&E reality TV, LEGO’s instagram, medical textbooks and Mc Donalds.

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

‘Girasol’ JO-HS, Mexico City, Mexico, 2021

‘Mujeres artistas en colonia san Rafael’, Galeria Hilario Galguera, Mexico City, Mexico 2021

‘Evolution’, Huerto Roma Verde, Mexico City, Mexico 2021

‘Zona Maco’ ,Casa Versailles, Mexico City, Mexico, 2021

‘Grief is Absurd’, Academie Minerva,Groningen, Netherlands, 2017

‘No business as usual’,Vesta, Groningen, Netherlands, 2017

‘They’ll Drop You Know- Mother’, Poelestraat 28,Groningen, Netherlands, 2016

‘March Expo’,Academie Minerva , Groningen , Netherlands, 2015

‘Open Studios’ , 205 Hudson Street,New York City, USA, 2015

‘Miniature Paintings’ , Hunter College , New York City, USA, 2015

‘Drawing’,Kunstfabrik, Berlin , Germany, 2014