Romita’s art is a reflection on contradictions, layering challenging perspectives over commonplace subjects. Using imagery pulled from pop culture and history, she rearranges and re-presents familiar visuals in a format that challenges her audience to look more closely at the surface object to find the conceptual artifacts hidden within. A hyperrealistic portrait on further inspection yields planets and starfields; an obsolete coin is re-imagined in needlework to memorialize the colonial nation-state as event. Religious and anatomical motifs are juxtaposed in textile reliquaries, and even the process of creation is pressed into service as an end product.
Eva Romita lives and works on the windswept granite coast of Mi’kma’ki – the unceded territory and ancestral homeland of the Mi’kmaq Nation. A long-time resident of Vancouver, British Columbia, her present home and studio on the Atlantic coast provide the stillness of mind and changeability of weather that inform her practice. Her paintings and installations have been included in a variety of international art publications, exhibited in Canada and the US, and are held in private collections around the world.