Aubrey Rhodes graduated from USF in 2005 with an MFA. Before painting full-time, she taught fiction-writing workshops at the University of California, Berkeley. Her paintings have been featured in numerous newspapers and magazines throughout the United States and Australia. Since 2011, her work has appeared four times in New York Studio Visit Magazine, where her painting Envy Me was selected as the cover image for Issue 14. A selection of her work is currently represented by Kenneth Paul Lesko Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio. Rhodes also exhibits regularly from her studio gallery in Melbourne, Australia, where she lives and works.
Rhodes’ recent paintings explore the relationship between language, mythology, and the natural world. Constructed upon surfaces made entirely from fragments of printed text, her works begin with a foundation of human voices—headlines, advertisements, stories, opinions, aspirations, and fears. These accumulated words form a symbolic landscape from which her imagery emerges.
In her most recent series, “The Birds,” Rhodes imagines a cast of hybrid beings existing at the boundary between language and nature. Emerging from worlds built entirely of human text, these mythic figures inhabit a liminal space where culture meets instinct, and where human narratives intersect with older forms of knowledge carried through symbol, memory, and the living world. Part woman, part bird, they recall guardians, nymphs, harpies, muses, and goddesses without belonging to any single mythology. Instead, they occupy a realm of their own—a personal mythology shaped by recurring motifs of flowers, nests, eggs, feathers, and hummingbirds.
Throughout the series, hummingbirds act as messengers between worlds, moving between the realm of human language and a deeper symbolic landscape that lies beyond it. The figures themselves are neither wholly civilized nor wholly wild, but embodiments of the tensions and harmonies that exist between consciousness and instinct, imagination and reality, beauty and mortality. Their presence suggests that these apparent opposites may be less separate than we imagine.
Rather than illustrating specific narratives, Rhodes’ paintings invite viewers into a space where myth, memory, nature, and culture converge. Her work explores the symbolic terrain that exists before, beneath, and beyond narrative—where instinct, imagination, and shared human experience intersect. Through recurring archetypal forms and motifs, the paintings hint at a deeper interconnectedness beneath the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.