Virginia Deaver

Virginia Deaver’s practice moves between painting and performance, grounding itself in the body as a site of instinct, vulnerability, and transformation. Originally from southern Appalachia and now based in Los Angeles, her work draws from literature and performative gesture to merge magical realism with a deeply human sense of tension and hope.

Deaver often abstracts the human figure to examine how people navigate desire, absurdity, and emotional rupture. Nature becomes both witness and accomplice, an active presence that shapes connections, dissolutions, and the instability between them. Her imagery lingers in the moment when something shifts: the instant before impact, the break in logic, the ethical hesitation. A car crash. A lightning strike. An unwanted touch. A wish granted at someone else’s cost. These scenes suggest that transformation often begins when control slips.

With studies in Classical and Ancient cultures, Political Science, Ethics, and Philosophy, Deaver frames moral questions as visual dramas. Her figures inhabit situations that feel instinctive, taboo, or conflicted. These choices expose the fragile line between survival, agency, and desire.

Her recent series GRATUITY turns toward the world of customer service, considering how labor, intimacy, exhaustion, and care circulate between worker and customer. These paintings stage encounters in which both parties reach for relief, recognition, or a momentary escape. Safety and strain coexist, and desire and survival intertwine.

Across her practice, Deaver returns to themes of disaster, tenderness, longing, and the search for clarity inside chaos. Her works ask what it means to want, to give, to break, or to be seen in the middle of a storm. This approach aligns with Alday Hunken Gallery’s interest in emotional landscapes and the aesthetics of tension.

Inspirations / Studies:
Samuel Beckett’s absurdist theatre; the writings of James Baldwin; the Southern Gothic gaze of Sally Mann; the cinematic poetics of Akira Kurosawa; Latin American Magical Realism; the rituals of eating and gathering; the layered meanings of “intercourse,” from intimacy to exchange; the complexities and mythologies of motherhood.