Would love to see you at my upcoming thesis show, “Reconfigured,” on view April 14 - 18th, at Pratt Institute’s Steuben Gallery.
The Opening Reception is on April 14th 5-7pm, hope to see you there!
The gallery is open daily, Monday - Friday, 9 - 5pm.
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“Reconfigured” is the embodiment of my experience with physical impairment and surgical trauma. The work contorts, manipulates, and reconfigures figurative forms in ways intended to inhibit, emphasize, alter, obscure, or reinvent function.
The paintings explore body as stranger, and unravel the idea of body through forms of similarity and dissimilarity, reconfigured. The anatomical alterations transcend expectations of body, intended to confuse visual modes of recognition and disorient physical familiarity in an attempt to provoke an awareness of similarity in form but dissimilarity in function. An uncanny familiarity of seeing parts of yourself within a figuration that challenges our idea of the human body.
The oils on canvas play with brushstrokes, translucency, sculpting and un-sculpting form, and spatial emptiness as eerie as a whisper.
The intent is not to glorify physical limitations, but rather depict my experience of grappling with a body and mind no longer my own, lost to medical trauma. The pieces explore being haunted by the feeling of body dissociating from self, becoming a vessel drenched in unfamiliarity, so separate from soul that even dance cannot reach. As a classically trained ballerina, my body cannot fathom the feeling of being reconfigured.
As my body whips into a pirouette, my muscles admit their memories forgotten, my knees throw a tantrum, my quads squirm, my bones rage, arm melts into leg, knee knots with knee, my spine creaks, my feet yell, and I become, reconfigured.
"Rusted"
60" x 48"
Oil on Canvas