Bridget Curtis is a Nashville, TN based painter and mixed media artist whose practice investigates human perception through the lens of universal archetypes, symbolism, and the body. Grounded in the language of art history, cinema, and tragedy, her work engages with the surreal and the uncanny to construct images that feel at once tender and disquieting. Drawing from psychoanalytic theory and concepts of abjection, Curtis considers how primordial images, derived from myth, legend, and fairy tale, persist within the unconscious and shape instinctive responses to history and narrative. Her paintings depict figures and objects that are not entirely novel, but repressed or inherited version of reality. recognition emerges amidst unease.

Influenced by Gothic and Renaissance iconography, as well as cinematic staging and domestic interiors, Curtis’s compositions often occupy a suspended moment: poised amidst action, aftermath, or psychological rupture. Both human and animal bodies become symbolic sites through which themes of grief, violence, ritual, and care are examined.

By subverting established archetypes, positioning innocence as threat or the maternal as ambiguous, Curtis creates a destabilized reading of symbolism and intent. Her work situates tragedy not as spectacle or exploitation, but as a mode of contemplation, wherein representation offers a moment to consider the actors within the action, and the roles they intend to perform.