Stacy Pearl’s work plays at the edges of meaning, orchestrating an intentional dissonance between imagery and interpretation.
Stacy Pearl creates surreal, collage-like paintings that remix design, myth, and humor into strange and poetic compositions.
Her paintings evoke the feeling of déjà vu in collage form, objects half-remembered from dreams, domestic artifacts, modernist detritus, and cryptic phrases, assembled into layered, surreal compositions. Across three works created between 2019 and 2023, Pearl invites us to investigate not coherence, but contrast. The result is an experience as visual as it is psychological, hovering between the ironic and the sincere.
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Panton/ Birches/ Heart, Stacy Pearl, 2023, acrylic, 16 x 28 in. / 40.64 x 71.12 cm.
In Panton / Birches / Heart, Pearl arranges three discrete panels that feel like visual notes from unrelated films. A floating Panton chair, a forest of white birch trees, and a medical illustration of a heart each claim their own spatial logic, refusing to unify. Rather than narrate, the painting performs a fragmentation of attention, the kind that defines modern consciousness. The slick red of the chair bleeds into the organic fire of the forest, which in turn is met by the stark anatomical heart: desire, nature, and mortality offered as adjacent but uninterpretable facts.
Fire Escape, Picasso Triggerfish, Red Heels, Magic, Kachina, Stacy Pearl, 2019, acrylic on Masonite, 36 x 24 in. / 91.44 x 60.96 cm.
Fire Escape, Picasso Triggerfish, Red Heels, Magic, Kachina feels like a scrambled transmission from someone’s subconscious. The composition is deliberately busy, chaotic even, with a fire escape cutting diagonally across a verdant tree canopy while a cascade of red heels snakes upward in impossible formation. At the bottom: a fish and a row of faucets. And suspended above it all is a small Kachina doll on a yellow field. Pearl resists meaning-making, letting these disparate symbols bounce against one another like magnets with mismatched poles. The result is a spatial poem, more absurdist than abstract, stitched together with precision and play.
Half Cezanne Bather / Lost Call / Random Text, Stacy Pearl, 2022, acrylic on MDF, 16 x 16 in. / 40.64 x 40.64 cm.
Half Cezanne Bather / Lost Call / Random Text reduces its visual elements to two simple halves: on one side, a reproduction of a classical nude painting in a faux-gilded frame; on the other, a red phone receiver hangs against a plain white backdrop. Below it, the text “birds chirping” completes the juxtaposition. The painting compresses centuries of art history, pop culture, and contemporary detachment into one deadpan composition. What should be poetic becomes absurd. What could be tragic becomes ironic. The result: a blank tonal space, where viewers project meaning, or fail to.
Stacy Pearl’s work resists traditional readings, embracing contradiction as its organizing principle. Whether through domestic design tropes, cartoon references, or nods to modernist art, her paintings create a kind of symbolic white noise. These are visual poems not meant to be decoded, but experienced like waking up mid-dream. They revel in their refusal to resolve, instead offering a fragmented mirror of modern perception, chaotic, hilarious, sincere, and meaningless all at once.
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