“I am blown away with the work that Traverso is doing to not only create deeply personal paintings that capture vignettes of her life but that also reshape how one experiences painting itself. Through her different approaches to display and site-specificity, she creates new avenues for contemplation and interpretation that I am really excited to see.” – juror Lauren Cross, Gail-Oxford Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts, The Huntington.

Aineki Traverso (b. 1991) is a painter based in Atlanta and a current resident in the Studio Artist Program at Atlanta Contemporary. She uses the rhetoric of painting to find ways of reconciling a world and society that exist in a state of post-environmentalism, borne of climate change and advancing technology. Her work has most recently been exhibited in spaces such as Swan Coach House Gallery, Johnson Lowe, and Whitespace Gallery. Aineki has attended residencies at R&F Handmade Paints, Vermont Studio Center, Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, and VCCA. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2013 with a concentration in film theory.

Aineki’s painting exists within the amalgamation of figuration and expressionism, exploring the nuances of memory, nature, and technology as they relate to the human body. While weaving a personal narrative, her paintings speak to a mode of preservation through different styles of rendering, and the act of mark-making as a way to communicate memory and denote the passage of time. Her work references the flora, humans, and landscapes of her life to suggest new social settings or methods of care for self and others in the midst of overconsumption.