Koak’s painting style is deeply rooted in comics subculture, which she has been immersed in since childhood. Weaponizing the form’s subversive capabilities, she interrogates dominant modes of storytelling and stereotypical constructions of femininity. Her unruly lines, set against flat color fields, conjure figures with a visceral sense of agency and emotional complexity. Conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic under California’s wildfire-induced red skies of 2020, June challenges traditional binary representations of women as either desirable or maternal by emphasizing the figure’s sensuality as she nurses her child in a setting that hints at both intimacy and isolation as a consequence of early motherhood and the need to shelter in place.