Victoria Sauer graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with her BFA in Painting and Drawing in the spring of 2020. While still experimenting with many mediums, she often approaches her painting practice in a hyperrealistic manner—heavily influenced by photorealism and surrealism. Working from photographs she takes herself, Victoria uses oil paint to represent subjects that are familiar, yet slightly otherworldly, as she navigates the space between conscious and subconscious. Victoria’s work has been shown nationally from Colorado to Georgia. She currently serves as the Residency Fellow at Chattanooga arts organization and residency, Stove Works, as well as co-curator of online arts collective and residency, Mineral House Media.

My work scrutinizes the unspoken and overlooked experiences of everyday life, the moments residing within a level of reality that we find familiar but frequently ignore. I am investigating the coexistence between wake life and sleep life, and the commonplace subject matter that often goes unnoticed in both levels of consciousness. Driven by the idea that dreams are complementary and continuous to waking thought processes, my careful observations from reality as well as diligent recollections from dreams aim to create a dialogue with each other, both connected by the same relevant memories and experiences from past to present. As dreams continue to process the same information from our waking lives in a more rudimentary visual language, I seek to bring attention to this intersection of the ordinary and the uncanny, the everyday and the absurd, the real and the surreal. It is at this point of convergence where we begin to question whether we are awake or asleep. By responding to my own experience of reality, I hope to open up a point of access to the viewer, following the notion that we are all living our own separate lives, but unified together in the shared experience of human existence—the collective unconscious.