Best Artist By Which to Be Pleasantly Creeped Out
Gwyneth Scally
Scally's work is a weird but curiosity-arousing combination of photorealistic figure drawing, portraiture and anthropomorphism that juxtaposes humor and horror to pleasingly disturbing effect. Her sometimes-nightmarish dreamscapes are little insights into human and animal bodies and faces, and much of what she does is the art-world equivalent of observational humor: Wouldn't it be funny and strange if dogs had human hands for feet? What would land-based mer-people look like, and how would they stand? There's some difficult-to-parse commentary about religion in the mix (at least according to her artist statements and comments in interviews), but the visceral joys of Scally's paintings need no deep analysis or explication.
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