Faber’s 16 foot long piece “Shotgun Wedding” was featured in Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum’s “What We Hold On To,” a Top Exhibit of 2025 according to The Denver Post. She is an alum of the Drawing Never Dies residency. Faber received training in hand drafting, rendering, and perspective drawing from world-renowned architectural illustrator Tamatsu “Tommy” Yamamoto at Chamberlayne School of Design (Mount Ida College, Boston), where she was the recipient of the Thesis Critics’ Choice Award and earned a Bachelor of Science. She previously worked in camera and lighting departments in documentary, narrative, and experimental films. Her practice combines freehand drawing, drafting, cinematography principles, and a meticulous application of layering of color. She currently lives and works in Denver.
STATEMENT
My large-scale figurative oil paintings confront the romanticized “Traditional American Values” of small town America that have been co-opted by the sociopolitical establishment and sold back to us as aspirational.
My work focuses on relational inflection points painted in the high-noon, arid color palette of my rural Colorado youth. In detailed concept drawings and on canvas, I employ training in cinematography and architectural drafting to develop constructed narratives of the nuclear family in varying states of distress and complacency. Cinematic, slight high-angle compositions invite superiority over the subjects, while subtle distortions of perspective trap the viewer as complicit in the action. Pattern repetition and recurring iconography of shotguns, alcohol, flowers, and family heirlooms indicate the origin and cyclical intergenerational impact of rugged individualism. Rejecting the long-romanticized rural horizon, I often place figures in suffocating landscapes from which there is no escape.
These narratives are grounded in observation, collected oral histories, and research into the origin of idioms, norms, and propriety within small town America. My work trades easy condemnation for questions of cultural coercion and its impact on power and agency for those who are expected to abide by and uphold an America that didn’t actually exist.