artist statement
| ARTIST STATEMENT |
| for the solo museum exhibition QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO: Prophecy of Place August 2011 A project-based artist, I work with photography, original text, video, installation and documented site-specific performance collaborations. My bodies of work explore and inhabit unmarked sites where crimes against humanity have literally "taken place" – sites whose traumatic histories have been erased, and where contemporary efforts continue to actively obscure the historic acts. Questions of trauma, fracture, beauty and erasure are central to my practice. Because tangible, material evidence of atrocity usually no longer remains at these sites, the site itself is an abstraction, and often quite beautiful: buttercups blossoming at a demolished torture facility, or baby swallows nesting above an unmemorialized mass grave. I seek to record the fractured experiencing of these sites before, during, and after trauma. In that way, I am creating new evidence that resists erasure. I work with broken and altered film cameras and typewriters manufactured by Fascist dictatorships using slave labor. Themselves unlikely survivors of violence, these instruments have unique capacities, wounds and histories with the sites themselves. At sites, their often controversial presence provokes interaction and response from locals who recall their histories. My interdisciplinary works engage these disrupted voices and images to invoke a constellation of human experiences rather than declare a single unified message. Through manipulating the physical distortions in the cameras themselves, sites of atrocity are often unrecognizably dislodged from their habitual representations and contexts. I print my photographs directly from the negative, without any digital or software effects, preserving the artifacts of damage within the camera. My challenge is to incite new encounter and engagement with sites and stories that have been silenced. My pieces serve as witness, but also seek to elicit more evolved human responses to resisting, preventing and memorializing crimes against humanity. ------------------------- image by Eric Grush / Studio Grushky. Performance still from Quintan Ana Wikswo's SONDERBAUTEN: THE SPECIAL BLOCK. Choreographer Alexx Shilling. Dancers Mimi Yin and Sarah Young. Composer Isaac Schankler. Violin Andrew Tholl. ------------------------- |
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