THESIS EXHIBITION: March 22 - 25

Opening Reception: March 24, 6 - 8pm

Dancers, 2022, crayon on carved wood floor panel, 24 x 72 inches

Akerman’s big splash, her kitchen mess, 2022, graphite, acrylic marker, oil paint on prepared paper, 40 x 60 inches

Artist Statement

My art practice is an affective bibliography through which I collect historical autotheoretical texts written by women. These are critical texts, oriented around a pragmatic use of the self as material.  

My thesis show: I can love everything, is anchored by four works on paper which reference Violette Leduc’s “La Batarde” (1964) and Clarice Lispector’s “The Hour of the Star” (1977). The paper is prepared so that it mimics a book cover – waxy with a slight sheen, and a spine down the middle. The surfaces of these works are permeable membranes: graphite is nudged into paper, coated paper is carved away revealing its soft, bright, raw interior, paint is laid down in varying levels of transparency. Images bloom out of each other through a material layering which recalls the experience of thinking with a book. These pseudo covers conjure the intimate, lush, notational spaces of the margin, where language is worked out through sensual-cerebral processes of analogy and translation. These works are mirrors between the referential and the subjective.  

I am the primary subject of my work, though I approach myself Indirectly through a veil of associations. Rather than present a likeness or a coherent identity, I play with the screen through which I have been constructed as a subject. 

All photos credited to Liz Vitlin.