Gisela McDaniel's paintings act as a vehicle for both her own healing from sexual trauma and for the survivors she paints.
Read MoreAlthough painted portraiture forms the basis of her practice, McDaniel also incorporates elements of assemblage and motion-activated audio, which give key context to her visuals.
The artist's recordings relay fragments of conversations between the artist and people whose portraits she paints. Many of her sitters are people who have difficult stories that have historically been erased, primarily woman of colour who identify as indigenous, multiracial, or immigrant. McDaniel frames the portraiture experience as a healing space, where woman and non-binary people who have survived sexual violence have a confidential mode for exploring their thoughts.
In Presence (2020), the subject gazes out inquisitively, a colourful array of objects and forms surrounding their body. As with her other works, Presence is based off a photograph taken immediately after the interviewing process, with additional elements developed from their interactions added afterwards. These can take the form of objects literally embedded into the canvas' surface, including flowers, scraps of clothing, and jewellery, which either belong to or have symbolic significance to the sitter. In works like Nightmare (2020) and Paloa'an Míhinilat (2020), these found objects gently cascade off the edge of the canvas, disrupting the pictorial containment of the image and evoking totemic and ritual associations.
In other works, McDaniel's additions to portraits are environmental, often a kaleidoscopic representation of flora and landscape that relocate her sitters to imagined, surreal spaces. In Complex Faces (2020), interior and exterior spaces collide, with her seated subjects collaged into a fantastical jungle-scape. McDaniel's earlier works, including her self-portraits, present masked figures to ensure the sitter's anonymity and safety—in Complex Faces, the mask is stripped, with sitters' faces adorned with armour-like strips of colourful jewellery. This adornment features in most of her ongoing portraits.
As an indigenous Pacific Islander, McDaniel often comments on the ways that her practice resists the infamously problematic works of Paul Gauguin.
In an interview with artnet, McDaniel explains that she wants to 'replace his work', using her own practice to decolonise Gauguin's gendered and imperialist legacy. Through questioning visual representations of the Pacific, McDaniel locates herself in a history of art and activism. This is evident in works like Inagofli'e (2021), where the subject is posed very similarly to Gauguin's Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892). In McDaniel's work, however, the portrait is of a collaborator, the sitter's stories jointly channelled through conversational narrative. The sitters have direct control over how they're represented, in what space and with which objects. McDaniel aims to 'visually express their relationship to their own bodies, and to document their journeys towards healing.' This ethic stands in direct opposition to Gauguin's predatory gaze.
