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Artist’s Statement
The kind of work I choose to create is often dictated by my current form of being. And at the age of twenty, my current form is most accurately described through liminality: the state of being caught on the threshold between two contrasting existential planes. As I become increasingly aware of my fruition into adulthood and the responsibilities held therein, my urge to regress back to a sense of youth, innocence, and freedom encompasses me and I find myself withdrawing from the bureaucratic, structured world around me into a child-like realm of indealistic wonderment. It is this escapist mentality that ultimately led to the creation of my spring project.
For my project I chose to do an installation and mixed media series based on the themes of regression, escapism, nostalgia, and the stagnancy and fluidity of time. I wanted to work with both 2D and 3D elements in order to improve my technical skills in painting and figure studies while still allowing myself to practice what I love to do: to make and to build. I was also drawn to the concept of installation art – creating not only an object for the viewer to observe and contemplate, but an experience of place, time, space, and mentality that the viewer can see, smell, hear, and feel. I aimed to provide myself with an escape from reality that could be experienced by others in this way. So I turned to my favorite childhood form of escapism: the creation of secret spaces, more commonly known as “forts.”
My installation piece is a fort I built in the woods surrounding Evergreen, as well as numerous mixed media pieces that are housed within it. When children build forts they utilize found objects aesthetically and functionally – to decorate their special space in order to make it more personal, and to create form and structure, like the windows and doors of their adult-sized versions. I use assemblage or “found objects” throughout my series to encapsulate this aspect of fort-building. Some pieces are purely meant for aesthetics, like the shadowboxes, while others are more artifact-like, like the candle I employ after nightfall, the oil painting that acts as a window through which one sees the surreal landscape that my fort is built within, and a small bow that holds paper and pencils for myself and passersby to jot down comments, thoughts, and reflections on their experience in the space.
What you see before you is the insertion of my mixed media series into a gallery setting. Though it cannot provide the same sensation as it would in its proper location, I attempted to achieve a similar effect with the design of the gallery space, photographs of the fort structure, and copies of a map leading to the fort so you can experience it for yourself.
Thank you for reviewing my work from the past quarter, and I hope you get a chance to visit the installation in person one day.
In progress
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