Poster Design by Julie Sydes
OPENING: SEPTEMBER 12th
ARTIST TALK: SEPTEMBER 11th, UNCW CULTURAL ARTS BUILDING
Artist Bio
As a child, I was not allowed inside any of my grandparents’ houses. My paternal grandmother was a hoarder, completely filling her home to the brim. The mounds of stuff were revealed to me only through her front window during the many summer afternoons I would spend visiting her, but only on her front porch. I set foot in her home for the first time when I was in my late teens, when she moved into assisted living and the task of emptying her home fell on my family. When my parents were going through personal papers in my grandmother’s house, they came across an unexpected discovery: papers surrendering parental rights to the daughter my grandmother had given up for adoption more than a decade before my father was born. My family had no idea. My father tracked down his half-sister and we met her. She was only in our life a few years before she died. After her death, my parents saw her home for the first time. Upon entering, they found it filled with stuff. It was a chilling replica of my grandmother’s house – her biological mother, with whom she had had no contact until she was 60 years old. Perhaps the most haunting part of this whole situation was that although her adoptive parents renamed her, the original name my grandmother had put on the birth certificate was Anna Katherine. Over forty years later, with no knowledge of the existence of this person, my parents named me Katherine Ann. The process of learning about long hidden aspects of family history brought about new insights into the inner workings of my own brain and the mysterious workings of genetics, epigenetics, and generational trauma. My current work depicts this family history and the exploration of these intergenerational connections. For this installation of a black and white room, I “remove” the color from the elements of the installation by tracing the patterns on the objects with black permanent marker and then painting in the shapes solid white. The items start to camouflage into one another, creating unease and uncertainty about where one object starts and another begins, which starts to make one question reality.
ARTIST TALK: SEPTEMBER 11th, UNCW CULTURAL ARTS BUILDING
Artist Bio
As a child, I was not allowed inside any of my grandparents’ houses. My paternal grandmother was a hoarder, completely filling her home to the brim. The mounds of stuff were revealed to me only through her front window during the many summer afternoons I would spend visiting her, but only on her front porch. I set foot in her home for the first time when I was in my late teens, when she moved into assisted living and the task of emptying her home fell on my family. When my parents were going through personal papers in my grandmother’s house, they came across an unexpected discovery: papers surrendering parental rights to the daughter my grandmother had given up for adoption more than a decade before my father was born. My family had no idea. My father tracked down his half-sister and we met her. She was only in our life a few years before she died. After her death, my parents saw her home for the first time. Upon entering, they found it filled with stuff. It was a chilling replica of my grandmother’s house – her biological mother, with whom she had had no contact until she was 60 years old. Perhaps the most haunting part of this whole situation was that although her adoptive parents renamed her, the original name my grandmother had put on the birth certificate was Anna Katherine. Over forty years later, with no knowledge of the existence of this person, my parents named me Katherine Ann. The process of learning about long hidden aspects of family history brought about new insights into the inner workings of my own brain and the mysterious workings of genetics, epigenetics, and generational trauma. My current work depicts this family history and the exploration of these intergenerational connections. For this installation of a black and white room, I “remove” the color from the elements of the installation by tracing the patterns on the objects with black permanent marker and then painting in the shapes solid white. The items start to camouflage into one another, creating unease and uncertainty about where one object starts and another begins, which starts to make one question reality.
