Vanessa Powers is a surreal figurative oil painter whose work uses a visceral symbolic language to navigate her inner world and how it relates to our current cultural climate in terms of how we process loss and uncertainty. Her paintings explore themes including grief, vice, mortality, and resiliency. Her work acts simultaneously as self portraits and memorials for people, places, and times that have passed.

Vanessa uses symbolism from phenomena in biology and earth science to ground her subconscious in a way that feels tangible in the real world. The figures in her paintings are translucent or isolated parts of bodies set in landscapes of places where she grew up on Long Island that often reference the climate crisis. The absence of the body within her figures is a meditative process that relies on where her emotions physically reveal themselves. The translucent insects and plants in her work can mostly be found in nature and are an example of this oscillation she presents between her subconscious, our collective psyche, and the natural world.