SENIOR EXHIBITION 2022: BODY POLITIC

ARTIST STATEMENT

How you view the world affects your emotions, reality, universe, YOU. What happens when your view is altered? This is a visual representation of my relationship with prescription medications, and, ultimately, with life. It represents the beginning of my journey self-medicating and taking prescription medications.

At the beginning of the Fall Semester, 2021, I was empty, no desire, no passion; in other words, no one was home. At the same time, I was being asked to create a concept for my senior show. I spent months “going through the motions” of living life. I pulled inspiration from my routine and current reality to create a concept for the exhibition. My first piece of the semester, a lighter… you get it, represents what started as recreational drug use but later became my first definition of “self-medicating.”

Nothing much came from my fall semester. I knew I wanted to work with light and bright colors in a pop art, psychedelic-like environment. A part of me was trying to reinvent my reality, recolor it, relight it, and revert back to a world I once knew.

After a long time–a very very long time–I figured it out. My medications had been doubled and had gone into overdrive. It became a break from all emotion, good or bad, positive or negative–a break from being alive, from what makes us human.

I then knew what I wanted my Senior Exhibition to become. I wanted to take the decisions I made trying to reimagine my reality and doing so to bring in elements from my routine: bold colors, the pop art look, and lights define my efforts to reimagine my world during my “break.” I was attempting to escape the gray-schemed filter that had overtaken my life. I was made up of pills. I had settled for artificial, plastic–in other words, for fake flowers. It was desire and emotion, serotonin, life and passion–all manufactured and served up in tiny pills.

To view this collection is to step into my mind, to momentarily experience my universe, and to visualize my coping strategies, revelations, and what was the reality I was living. I wanted to create an environment that was eye-catching…. a little obnoxious; I wanted to display objects common in my everyday routine in order to show how intensely my reality had flipped upside down. Normal things, everyday routines: these had changed. They meant more.