"At times, the recent global and national devastation, division, and so many disappointments felt like a surreal projection of my own mental states in the isolation of the last 18 months. I began to explore the human reliance on control and predictability, and how our deepest suffering comes from our attachment to security, virtue, identity, and the logic of cause and effect."

- Alyssa Monks

“Monks’ terrified, isolated woman, her mouth wide open in a scream in ‘Watch The Only Way Out Disappear,’ is more than a match for the terrified, isolated man in Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream,’ 1893, and more able to hold her own against death, for she does not shrink from it, as Munch’s dehumanized ghost, not to say haunted shadow, of a man does.  If ‘gross environmental failure can result in a loss of the individual’s capacity for maintaining integration,’ as the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott wrote, then Monks retains her integrity despite the gross environmental failure that is the pandemic, however much she fears it, however much it forces her back on herself—and she is always recognizably herself.”

- Donald Kuspit, Whitehot Magazine, December 2021

"The glass barrier in these paintings between subject and viewer is clouded with vapor that obscures and abstracts the subject.  This barrier underlines the personal and community-wide preoccupation with virus-laden respiratory droplets and the isolation it creates.  Some works are more ambiguous than others, amplifying the state of disorientation in the face of terrifying unfamiliarity.  Each piece has its own, often-layered, strategy, voice and urgent plea."

- Alyssa Monks

"One of the most painful truths in life is that there are difficult events and circumstances that we cannot control or influence. Perhaps in accepting our limitations, and the often life-altering grief that goes along with them, we can find a greater authenticity of being, a sense of empathy, and an understanding that we are not quite so isolated after all. The paintings in this series paradoxically reveal our shared human experience as they describe private moments of distress."

- Alyssa Monks