As InLiquid welcomes in a new year, new gallery, and its new members with New Now, where artists will share their most recent works, many express the elusive, yet familiar, ideas of memory and its fragile, vulnerable nature.
Emily Orzech has always explored human movement and mass within our environments, but now brings an extra personal touch of family, illness, and identity within the artist’s usual context:
“Rest is part of the new series of work, Family History, which was catalyzed by my late partner’s illness and my experience navigating the health system. I use self-portraiture as a way to reconstruct memory, re-performing and photographing habitual motions, which I then translate into woodblock and silkscreen prints. The works are not so much about diagnosis, disease, or dying as they are about the liminal space of living in between.”
Sarah Slate conveys the “tension inherent in the vulnerability of cut paper” and uses that to explore how her figures’ straddle inner psyche and physical reality.
“The cutting is meditative,” states Slate. The time-consuming, meticulous process allows the artist time to really let the weight of her work sink in and establish emotional connections, creating an intuitive bridge to draw people and objects from memory.
Veronica Constable‘s work embodies the softness of memory and its fragility, while edged in the trauma she wishes for her viewers to acknowledge:
“I am interested in the idea of the gaze, the nuances associated with the notion of agency of the subject and the image, and depicting trauma through life-sized colored pencil drawings of my sisters. Disregarding stereotypes, dysfunctional behavior can be incredibly subtle or explicit, thus making it difficult to see and understand. I am interested in bringing attention to these issues not only to the art world but to a larger demographic as well. Sweet Dreams questions perceptions of trauma while engaging in a dialogue with the psychoanalytic notion of the uncanny as it relates to the aesthetics of nostalgia.”
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