!! Announcement: I am graduating !!
Updated May 8 2024:
In my colorful charcoal and oil pastel drawings on collaged canvas, I portray subjects and scenes from my camera roll but use abstraction to draw the viewer’s attention to “presences” within the drawing. I explore everyday scenes through textures and mark-making, ultimately depicting the desire for our existences and memories to be noticed, understood, and respected by others. The textures from the drawing media and the collaged canvas themselves become whispers of this unseen audience. They are the traces left behind by the creative process—gestural marks and etchings with oil pastel, sections where charcoal "melts away" into the background, and subtle collages. These elements pull the viewer's attention to the ripples of presence within the artwork.
This concept of the audience in everyday life is deeply personal. While feeling anxious and disconnected from the world around me, I turned to the physicality of etching designs into pages colored completely in oil pastels. The physical act of drawing and the drastic shift to colorful media gave me an avenue to get out of my head. I began visualizing and imagining my past self, past loved ones, and friends surrounding me to feel less alone.
This desire to be witnessed extends beyond the artwork itself. I want others to look at the world like everyday life is like a theater with an unseen audience. I want to challenge viewers not only to consider unseen audiences in their own lives but also to begin flipping the roles. Particularly, a quote from Polish artist and playwright Tadeusz Kantor’s Today Is My Birthday feels burned into my mind: “I’m ‘on stage’ again. I think I’ll never fully and clearly explain this habit to you or to me. Actually, it’s not a stage but a border.” I want to question who is on stage, who is in the audience, and who is closing the curtain.
By working on many-sized canvases, I want to explore alongside the viewer how the scale of an image, reflecting the smallness or grandness of a moment,influences how the detail of presences present themselves in each. My curiosity in the macro and micro scale and color stems from my study of instrumental and materials chemistry, which teach me to observe the world analytically. In particular, I am interested in the intersection of color and scale—how the wavelength of light used in spectroscopy limits what we can see and how the size of quantum dots, and therefore their capacity to confine electrons within them, determine the color the nanoparticle emits.
My expansion from monochromatic to vivid imagery is also influenced by my study of Polish abstract artists between 1950 and 1970, who depicted everyday scenes using unnatural colors and whose style aimed to reintroduce abstraction into a socialist realism-mandated art world. The work of Piotr Potworowski, Jan Cybis, and Tadeusz Dominik exemplifies the subjectivity of reality. Potworowski specifically aimed to use color to legitimize and invite others into his perception of his surroundings. In studying the works of these Polish painters, I enter a conversation with the presences of history. Finding inspiration in Polish artists is also a personal connection: my heritage informs my interest in life beyond the physical. It pushes me to remember and show gratitude to my loved ones who passed their traditions on. My art allows me to feel and envision their company in my everyday life.
I want my artwork to be a reminder that we are all actors on the stage of life, constantly watched and constantly seeking to be seen. By acknowledging the unseen audience, we can create a deeper connection with the world around us.