AGE: 32
BASED: New York

“The horror genre kind of operates as a ready-made,” says Michelle Uckotter. “I get into [my work] by playing with those signifiers. It’s fun to salvage or cannibalize elements of cinematography.”

The 32-year-old artist’s oil pastels do just that. She cites slashers like The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby as inspiration for her haunting oil pastels, which vibrate with anticipation and ambiguity—like film stills plucked from a moment of peak suspense. “Film is the modern education of the masses that took off where painting stopped,” Uckotter says.

Blocking a shot is not unlike establishing the composition of a painting, and it is this shared process of filling space with people that guides much of the Cincinnati-born, New York– based artist’s work. Uckotter’s figures, often ghostly women, seem either to lure the viewer deeper into the scene or to be lost in it themselves, creating what she calls a “subtle, simmering hint of sex and violence.” A single question looms: Is anyone there?

“There’s something disturbing—a detachment from identity—that I’m chasing,” muses Uckotter. This series is a departure for the artist, who first developed an assemblage practice while wandering Baltimore’s alleyways and getting her BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. “Oil pastels allow me to have this dusty quality … the waxiness gives them a grunginess that I really enjoy.”

In February, Uckotter will take her signature brand of uncanniness to the screen in a concurrent solo show with Matthew Brown Gallery and two-person showing at Marc Selwyn Gallery in Los Angeles. The artist will debut her first film work, which is currently untitled and still in the editing process. “The film is processed through the paintings, but at the same time it’s this [new] avenue,” she concludes. “It’s expanding the vocabulary of what I make and what my concerns are.”