Resilience

Senior Studio and Thesis Show, April 2008
Artist Statement:
My artwork is chiefly autobiographical – it deals extensively with themes of family, personal development and growth. In this exhibition I explore different concepts of home through people, locations, family, and cultural identity. Some of my associations with home are permanent memories and some are constantly evolving. When I think about the word home I remember the house I grew up in, which was always in a state of reconstruction. I think about how since I moved out of that house, I have not lived in a stable residence.
For me, home has come to mean traveling, temporary residences, and the influential people I have surrounded myself with along the way. My obsession with other people’s homes and family dynamic is rooted in my ongoing search for a domestic environment I can call my own. Although home is something I am still coming to terms with, I am resilient. And I’m still working on overcoming my hardships by sharing these experiences through my art.
My artistic process is a framework for psychological healing and creative expression. My memories shape my identity and I process much of my own personal evolution through these works. Through the pieces in my show I hope to convey the idea of a homelike structure that I have built for myself over the years, and am still trying to define.

Coming Clean

This project began with the memory of a neglected bathtub that sat at the top of the stairs in my childhood home for about eight years. It was waiting there to be placed in the remodeled bathroom that never came to be. I began to put the pieces together of how the brand new bathtub, still in its box, represented the theme of unfinished business in my family history.
The tub represents me overcoming experiences. The tiles reflect my family history and the meaningful people in my life: both sides of my grandparents, my divorced parents, and my sister. Not only do the tiles reflect these unresolved relationships, but they also symbolize the incomplete rooms and spaces that were constants in my life.
In many ways this image has become that of an intangible object, which represents how we can re-create memories by learning and changing from them. This is not just about the theme of unfinished family business, it’s about me finishing something and giving the viewer the opportunity to view my past, which is beginning to feel finally resolved.

Whitehead Road

Each person has a unique attachment to the house they grew up in. Personally, I am extremely attached to the house that I spent the first ten years of my life in prior to my parent’s divorce. However, I was intimidated to revisit the house because of how it had inevitably changed since my family moved out eleven years ago. With this project, I went back to the property for the first time and explored the yard, the woods behind the house and the field across the street. The absence of the physical house in these three pictures represents my hesitations in calling it my own anymore and illustrates how the process of moving on from this site of my childhood is still in progress.

The Bouseks

This project was not a vicarious attempt to put my parents together again. I photographed both of them separately in their separate home settings then digitally placed them into the same place with Adobe Photoshop. My parents have neglected to be in the same room in over ten years, and this was a way to bring them together in domestic settings as if it was a normal experience. It was important for me to place them in each other’s environments to show the comfortableness, or lack there of, with their interactions with one another.

Self-Portraits

A Wedding Photograph

Untitled

I photographed the bodies of women I knew in natural, comfortable poses and juxtaposed them with a plastic bust in order to comment on today’s idealized female figure. The contrast between the two female forms manipulates the viewer’s gaze and forces them to question which figure they are aesthetically drawn to.