Living and working in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, Nora McBride creates vividly surreal paintings and works on paper that explore the tension between destruction and regeneration. With imagery that merges industrial ruins, cellular organisms, and playful dream symbols, McBride constructs a visual language of resilience and metamorphosis. Her compositions often feature disembodied eyes, skeletal limbs, and rainbow-like currents of energy—figures suspended between grief and transcendence. These recurring motifs act as emotional conduits, transforming private anxiety about the world’s instability into visions of collective renewal. Originally from the Twin Cities, McBride earned her MA in Printmaking from Adams State University in 2011. Working fluidly across painting, drawing, relief printmaking, and embroidery, she approaches each medium as a site for storytelling and catharsis. Influenced by the language of childhood cartoons, viral forms, and the textures of digital life, her work balances tenderness and unease—inviting viewers to look directly at what is both strange and human in themselves.