Sheila, a painter and pattern designer, incorporates her commercial background into her work through pattern, color and trend iconography. Her dreamlike paintings and portraits question the nature of the real versus unreal, dream versus reality, the overwhelmed individual versus fast-paced culture. In this body of work, "Fresh Squeezed," she investigates the relationship between escapism and the everyday individual by using the orange and other tropical iconography as symbols of invented Edens within contemporary culture. Via bold pattern and color, she parallels grandiose surrealist visions with normalcy: normal people, normal places, normal things. This play between bold commercial icons and internally-indulgent dialogue questions the feasibility of escaping from one's surroundings in our hyper-stimulated modern world.
