Featured image: Squeezed Like an Anger Ball, Gerri Rachins, 2024, mixed media, 30 x 22 in. / 76.2 x 55.88 cm.
Gerri Rachins creates abstract mixed media works that respond to the emotional, cultural, and political turbulence of contemporary life.
Gerri Rachins is a mixed media artist whose expressive abstractions explore personal, cultural, and political experiences through layered color, gesture, and form.
Working with Flashe paint, acrylic ink, and gouache on paper, her compositions embrace gesture, layered transparency, and vibrant color to visualize experiences that resist simple explanation. A Sort Of Confession, Skeletal Remains of Pond Sliders, and Squeezed From Gloves of Gas and Dust belong to her ongoing series Almost Everything Is Going Well, a body of work that explores personal vulnerability alongside collective uncertainty. Rather than offering fixed narratives, these paintings invite viewers to navigate ambiguity, conflict, and resilience through abstraction.
A Sort Of Confession, Gerri Rachins, 2022, mixed media, 30 x 22 in. / 76.2 x 55.88 cm.
A Sort Of Confession balances bold fields of saturated blue and coral against delicate gray linear structures that appear to bind and divide the composition simultaneously. The painting's layered surfaces suggest emotional tension beneath an outwardly simplified form, reflecting the contradictions implied by its title. Rachins uses sweeping gestures and controlled geometric interruptions to create a visual rhythm that feels both restrained and expressive. Influenced by the personal, political, and cultural conflicts that inform the Almost Everything Is Going Well series, the work becomes a meditation on vulnerability, suggesting that confession is rarely straightforward but instead unfolds through fragments, interruptions, and unresolved emotions.
Skeletal Remains of Pond Sliders, Gerri Rachins, 2024, mixed media, 30 x 22 in. / 76.2 x 55.88 cm.
In Skeletal Remains of Pond Sliders, overlapping washes of lavender, gray, turquoise, and muted blue create an intricate network of organic forms that appear suspended between growth and decay. Loose gestural lines weave across translucent layers, evoking skeletal structures, tangled vegetation, or biological systems without settling into a single interpretation. The mixed media process emphasizes accumulation and revision, allowing each mark to contribute to a sense of continual transformation. The composition reflects the fragile complexity of natural and emotional ecosystems alike, encouraging viewers to discover shifting relationships between structure, movement, and memory within the abstract landscape.
Squeezed From Gloves of Gas and Dust, Gerri Rachins, 2022, mixed media, 30 x 22 in. / 76.2 x 55.88 cm.
Squeezed From Gloves of Gas and Dust radiates intensity through a commanding palette of glowing oranges, reds, and deep black. Intersecting linear forms create an architectural framework that appears simultaneously constructed and dissolving, reinforcing themes of instability and pressure. The painting's title introduces associations with industrial materials, environmental anxiety, and the physical residue of conflict, while the abstract imagery remains open enough to accommodate multiple readings. As part of Almost Everything Is Going Well, the work captures the psychological compression of living amid ongoing uncertainty, transforming emotional strain into a dynamic composition that pulses with both tension and resilience.
Across A Sort Of Confession, Skeletal Remains of Pond Sliders, and Squeezed From Gloves of Gas and Dust, Gerri Rachins demonstrates how abstraction can communicate the complexities of contemporary experience without relying on literal imagery. Through layered materials, expressive mark-making, and carefully balanced compositions, she creates paintings that reflect personal introspection alongside broader cultural realities. Together, these works reveal an artistic practice that embraces uncertainty, inviting viewers to engage with emotion, memory, and transformation through the evolving language of abstraction.
Drifting Back Together in a Floating Rubble Pile, Gerri Rachins, 2024, mixed media, 30 x 22 in. / 76.2 x 55.88 cm.