Are you an artist, arts organization or venue?

artist

What town do you live in?

Amherst

In which disciplines do you work or exhibit?

Drawing, Painting, Video, Sculpture, Installation

Artist Statement/Bio

The wall and references to the wall in my work has become a metaphor to speak about the corporeal, the cognitive, and to make connections to concepts of place and space. The wall becomes both the body and a space for memory to occur as at the same time it occupies a sort of liminal space that doesn't fully occupy the present or the past. This question of balance between presence and absence, body and mind, the definable and indefinable in congruence with the concept of transformation is at the heart of my practice. I’m interested in the potential of the wall to reference the body as well as memory and place. At times the wall becomes skin and the use of reference to cloth is a way of speaking about the body that lies underneath as well as evoking the past in the associations that the patterns on the cloth hold.

Paul Ricoeur says memory defines itself as a struggle against forgetting. The use of text, the imprint of fabric, and ghostly impressions refer to traces of memory and thought. The physical erasing and covering of these traces represent the concept of forgetting as both something to be desired and feared. The use of white in my work has become one method of talking about the erasing or effacement of these traces. There are two main roles that the use of white is currently playing, one is more performative and the other spatial. The performative role deals with using the color to actively and methodically cover an element in the work. However, the inherently impossibility of the task at hand is present. What is covered never truly disappears, the renewal is not without memory of what was lost, and what is disguised is not transformed but built upon. The spatial role has to do with the negative, and negative referring to negative shape, absence. In this way what is white is the white of surface. It is the space where the imprint is left and the space for the viewers imprint to take shape.

Time and duration are also important elements in my work. Use of repetitive imagery and obsessive mark making functions to entrap the viewer in intricacy, in a pattern that can never be unraveled. The importance of repetition is directly related to theories of psychological trauma and schema theory. The repetition of a single phrase written in tiny, almost unreadable text speaks to the re-experiencing of traumatic memory. The phrase becomes a mantra, but it is personal and exclusive. It is not important to decipher what the text says or means. No specific personal references are made in order to leave room for the viewer to use the work as a starting point to reconnect with their own experiences and memories.

Website

http://www.michelledickson.com