Danielle Foster

Born in Los Angeles / Works in Los Angeles

Danielle Foster (b. 1995) is a visual artist from Los Angeles, California whose practice explores the intersection of psychology and horror. Through representational painting, she investigates memory, personhood, and the unsettling nature of the mind.

I'm Danielle Foster, a visual artist born and raised in Los Angeles, California. I hold a B.A. in Art from CSU Channel Islands and an M.F.A. in Fine Arts from Otis College of Art and Design. I specialize in traditional arts, digital design, and illustration.

My current practice positions itself between my previous educational background in psychology, and my love of horror genre. It is an investigation of memory, a questioning of personhood, and an unveiling of how unsettling the mind has the potential to be. Through the exploration of my own behavioral tendencies; I interrogate experiences recalled from adolescence that have contributed to my anxieties, fears, and have had a substantial impact on my sense of self. Through representational painting, the work suggests a level of cognitive dissonance between my sense of self today, my experiences as a woman, and my upbringing in the catholic church. To create this destabilization, I utilize techniques such as blurring, repetition, and symbology to mimic memory processing and illustrate how we archive moments of impact.

Recently, I’ve been exploring the metaphor ‘mind as a circus’ – Considering the deceptive, illusionary, performative nature of the circus and how this relates to conscious/unconscious thought. With this, my work becomes a constant push and pull between internal vs external, a negotiation of two-dimensional vs three-dimensional space, and a questioning of imagination vs reality, blurring the line that distinguishes each. This current body of work has been shown in group exhibitions across southern California.