#Impermanence

My Personal Artist Statement:

            I’ve been contemplating temporality a lot lately, particularly the temporality of four short college years.  It was the manifestation of this concept in intricate Buddhist mandala designs that ultimately inspired my current artistic practice.  The ancient ritual of mandala-making involves several skilled Buddhist monks who spend days or weeks creating brilliant, concentric patterns made of sand.  At the end of this laborious process, their efforts are swept away, released back into nature as a powerful reminder of impermanence.  With this in mind, I have created several mandala-inspired artworks for the Senior Exhibition, #impermanence.  Although they do not directly mirror the formal structure of Eastern sand-art ritual, each piece is similarly intended to ground the viewer in the present, drawing focus to a moment of fleeting beauty.

            My five-by-six-foot oil painting, Happy Hour at Tiffany’s, evokes an instant I caught on camera of sunlight hitting a crystal mug.  By translating the image onto a larger canvas, I attempted to recreate my snapshot of the shiny, reflective surface—of an isolated moment in time, when the light was just so, and I was the only whiteness—but despite my most meticulous rendering, I came to accept that what was once present to me in person could never be preserved.  The visual experience I had while studying the glass mug would never reoccur in the exact same way.  While a glimmer of it does linger in my work, the assertion of brighter, more saturated pops of color call to question how we perceive even the truest seeming fixtures in our lives, which inevitably shift with time. 

            In another work, Spectrums of Consciousness, I painted the backs of ten smaller canvases with quick-drying acrylic media to evoke the more direct, immediacy of paint on a surface.  I then cut careful, yet unplanned patterns into each canvas, and layered them on top of one another.  I encourage the viewer to engage with this installation from different angles around the gallery, so that the shadows and colors my paintings cast onto the walls and each other create a constantly evolving relationship between light, form, and space.  

            A series of cyanotype prints, Sun Sprints Across the Patio, repurposed Spectrums of Consciousness.  I used the canvases as stencils to create kaleidoscopic images with cyanotype and sunlight.  I brushed a chemical wash onto pieces of paper inside, letting them dry in the dark.  I then took the project outside and positioned the canvases on top of the paper, flipping, swapping, and layering the stencils at 30-60 second intervals.  Exposure to ultraviolet light transferred whips of patterns onto paper; the different tonalities that resulted represent changes to the surface over time. 

            As a graduating senior, I have temporality on the brain.  I think of springtime in Canton, of the muddy transition that bridges winter to summer, of the days in my planner, which get fuller and fewer the closer it comes to May 17th, of the leftover Sergi’s pizza that hardens in my mini fridge.  Light shifts, paint dries, perspective changes—ultimately, everything will.  #impermanence.