american artist
Tricia Butski
drawing
This body of work explores the limitations and aesthetics of human memory through portraiture. Like many of
our memories, these images have been cherished, processed, and therefore distorted. There’s a yearning for
clarity in them coupled with a potent vagueness—an ambivalence attuned to the tensions of recall.
The portraits are based on distortions. The use of charcoal provides a material analog for how impermanent,
fragile, and malleable memories become over time. Through a manipulative process, each portrait becomes
related though removed from its origin, calling attention to the ways in which remembering transfigures how we
recall the past. As a result, meaning is made out of nostalgia, partiality, longing, and loss.
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