Senior Thesis (2021-2022)

I have always been fascinated by how the human body functions. However, what has impacted my life the most are the moments when my body has malfunctioned. Since an early age, I have constantly felt that my body has been damaged and substandard. As a dancer, it was frustrating to have to deal with recurring injuries and disorders that prevented me from doing what I loved most. Having surgeries to correct these injuries and genetic issues became a routine for which I constantly seemed to be preparing. Even the most experienced doctors and surgeons failed to correct these malformations, which ultimately led to the loss of dance, subsequent disorders, severe trauma, and an unfortunate lack of trust in both healthcare professionals and my own body. However, after the loss of dance from my life, I shifted my creativity from a physical expression to a visual one through painting and drawing. I found that I was not only able to replace dance with art as a creative outlet, but that I could create imagery that was able to visually represent those experiences in order to help myself address my trauma as well as connect with others. In my Senior Art Thesis work and likely in my future work, I explored and portrayed the effect that these circumstances have had on me physically, psychologically, and emotionally by creating dream-like environments, scenarios, and abstractions to parallel and therapeutically confront my experience with trauma and PTSD through realistic and surrealistic paintings.

“Balancing Act” is my largest painting to date, depicting how I never felt like I was sure or steady. I could fall at any moment and re-injure myself. I hope people can read and understand the unpredictability of my situation, but also see my strength and determination through this image.	This painting is meant to represent the idea that people tend to constantly attempt to predict the future as if there are answers drawn out for us. Even as children, we create games like these paper toys to give us the illusion of knowing what will happen. We would obviously always hope for the best fortune, but the results are really just up to chance.	This painting represents how I was feeling as my surgeries were repeatedly failing. I had friends and family joke that I should just get rid of my feet and get new ones. However, at the time, I was feeling extremely frustrated with my own body and really did want to bag up my legs and throw them away. So, I represented that feeling in a very literal way, by painting myself tying trash bags around both of my legs in a surgical room setting with myself in a leotard to represent the loss of dance.
“Cat’s Cradle” is a sequence game played with looped strings. Two or more players use the string to create various formations, each person’s turn building on the last. The goal of the game is to get to the last formation without making a mistake. The doctor’s hands depicted here hopefully know how to create all of the formations in order to make it to the end of the game successfully.	In this painting, I used the afterimage effect to represent on the left, the trauma itself, and on the right the idea of those traumatic memories fading away since black and white photos are typically associated with the past. After staring at the inverted image on the left for at least 30 seconds then moving your eyes to the black and white image on the right, your brain transfers the opposite colors. Even after the removal of the initial stimulus, your brain overcompensates for what you saw.	I arranged these two paintings to fit together, so that one edge lead into the next, creating a flow showing how even when the rubber bands were removed, or when the doctor’s view was shifted after they discovered my disorder, the marks of that restriction or trauma were still left behind.
This intaglio print expresses the limits of my healing process, and and how like a matchstick runs out of wood when the flame burns it down, my time to heal was numbered with each repair by the seemingly inevitable next failed procedure.