Bedrooms Artist Statement

[Lying awake one night, sleeping mask on, mirtazepine working its way through my system, a rumbling, bassy noise reverberated in one of my ears. It was an internal voice, as close to my brain as possible. I think it greeted me. And in this near-sleep I felt both a profound terror and a strange, distant comfort. With the threat of seizures, of stranger hallucinations, of a violent nightmare impending, why, then, was the comfort what I feared most, and the terror a welcome friend?]

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I am interested in the subconscious recreation of memory as a means by which a person fills in the gaps where a discontinuity occurred. These discontinuities occur not only at moments of emotional extremity but unplaceability: when a strange balancing of pain and confusing pleasure occur at the same moment. At moments of trauma or moments in which a person cannot comprehend one’s own emotional response to something, there’s a fracture: the internal and external do not seem to correspond with one another, and this is either traumatic or confusing for the person witnessing it. Bedrooms is a mapping of these moments, an attempt to create a world parallel to the “real.” When, in memory, one revisits these inexplicable moments, he or she skews the exact scenario to fit the response he or she had. Thus these are flawed tableaux, informed by the emotional state of their viewer, attempting to put it into comprehensible terms in a desperate, slapdash effort. These works are intended to be printed large: the size is meant to make this as clear as possible to the viewer: the mistakes in craftsmanship show the holes and twists the mind puts on the actual observable “fact” of a moment, and their hastiness in construction may also show the immediate need for the mind to make sense of these moments. In creating this series of views, I hope to create a continuous world, one whose order and appearance are malleable in the hands of their original viewer to suit his/her needs, satisfying the desperate want for a continuous, sensible world, whose exterior and internal responses correspond evenly and comfortably. In this world I intend for there to be a consistency of perspective and a resonance of light and form that allows for the world to appear to be in its own continuity parallel to the world originally perceived. It is taking these errant points of confusion and creating from them a world with its own particular order, one so informed by their original viewer’s emotional response that, for him/her, makes some sense of the chaos.

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