Thesis Exhibition: February 26 - March 1, 2014

Opening Reception: Friday, February 28, 6 - 8:30pm

My current work aims to explore the construction of personal identities through trauma. I am interested in how the individual designs coping mechanisms to attempt to assimilate trauma into their lives, and how this transforms the traumatic experience. The work functions as a place of processing. When trauma is not assimilated into an individual’s life, it creates a space of blackness – of void, emptiness and denial. It causes a moment of rupture in which the individual is fractured and unable to return to their prior self. The void acts as a coping mechanism in which the individual denies, or erases the experience as a means to survive. The act of cutting/removing in my work thus becomes a physical reenactment of deconstructing moments of rupture. Cutting is then a way of coping, the action of removing text, image, experience. To counterbalance, my work holds an emphasis on collecting material (ephemeral materials, magazines, photographs, books). As a society, we collect to preserve or document, to journal, to reference and to give grounds for our experiences. This action attempts to fill the void that the unconfronted traumatic events cause. The material allows us to reminisce about the trauma rather than remember; it allows us to legitimize our experiences retrospectively.

“The Artists Hands”
2013
Photography
Credit: Karen Mauch

“The Artists Hands”
2013
Photography
Credit: Karen Mauch