← Return to The Space in Between: 2021 Senior Art Exhibition
My work discusses my fear of ephemerality due to illness, grief, and isolation. The threatened breakdown of my own sense of materiality, in combination with little to no outside stimulation to ground me, has pushed me into a state of paranoia, terror, and detachment from my previous purpose in life. In processing my reaction to the breakdown of materiality, I proceeded to replicate it. I paint the body strained with the clench of a hand, or the stretch of a neck, to depict the confinement one feels while striving for a connection between the internal and external self. My figures are found in destabilizing domestic environments constructed by organic fragments of frosted mylar paper, upheld by a network of tape woven through the pigments, and embedded in mounds of cold wax. The tape is a documentation of my process. It conveys the ephemerality of the body, and the materials used to create it. Imprints of color from layers below, left by removed tape, imitates the security and transparency of its counterpart. Smaller fragments of mylar are gouged from the surface and implanted onto the painting to disrupt the distinction between subject and object.