BFA Thesis Exhibit

Chloe Strang

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Artist Statement


How do we cope? How do YOU cope? What are your personal rituals?
 
Born out of compacted trauma, forgotten emotions, allowing empathy to flood everywhere except one’s own mind, my work explores possibilities of working through and confronting the stressors of everyday life, past trauma, compartmentalized memories, and ignored emotions. What are the motions necessary to get yourself out of bed in the morning? How do you calm your mind to fall asleep? Through depicting common coping mechanisms, I investigate the point when an intentionally healthy coping mechanism becomes abused into an unhealthy one. There is a moment of indulgence that comes with allowing yourself to heal- but there comes a time when your indulgence becomes the thing that is hurting you.
 
Carefully constructed compositions based in realism create a springboard for my work and allow me to experiment with color, emotion, movement, and texture. Painting at a large scale creates an opportunity for the viewer to realize the large role these small rituals and self-satisfying tasks play in everyday life. By partially obscuring and sometimes blurring the faces of the figures, the works’ focus shifts from the figure to the physicality of the task while still maintaining the identity of the individual portrayed. In the series of screen prints, I have extracted common coping mechanisms and isolated the illustrations in a style that references contemporary advertising campaigns. By displaying them together, it becomes a game of “choose your favorite coping mechanism”.
A blue and orange stereo with a yellow background. A green margarita with a lime with a hot pink background. A pale yellow post-it note with an emerald green background. A vintage television, with a green screen, on a royal blue background. A metal shopping cart with red handles and a lavender background. A white to-go coffee cup with a black lid and a brown paper holder on a sky blue background. Two royal blue hand weights that are royal blue on a lime green background. A simple white pack of cigarettes, with orange filters, on a bright red background. An orange pill bottle, with three half white, half orange pills sitting on the ground next to it in addition to the cap of the pill bottle, on a dark purple background. Click to view A blue and orange stereo with a yellow background. A green margarita with a lime with a hot pink background. A pale yellow post-it note with an emerald green background. A vintage television, with a green screen, on a royal blue background. A metal shopping cart with red handles and a lavender background. A white to-go coffee cup with a black lid and a brown paper holder on a sky blue background. Two royal blue hand weights that are royal blue on a lime green background. A simple white pack of cigarettes, with orange filters, on a bright red background. An orange pill bottle, with three half white, half orange pills sitting on the ground next to it in addition to the cap of the pill bottle, on a dark purple background. Full-Screen

Pick your poison // Nine, three-layer screen prints on Arnhem. Editions of 12.// 14 x 14 inches each