Vicious Cycle by multidisciplinary artist Kate MacNeil
An opening reception with the artist will take place on Friday, April 13, 2018 from 7-10pm.
Kate MacNeil’s work is rooted in a traditional practice of drawing and printmaking. Pursuing these interests over the years, she has found herself drawn to pushing the limits of print media, interspersing her practice with video, sound, and performance-based pieces. Through these intersections of media, her work explores themes of loss, memory, and mental illness.
Most recently, her work draws connections between the physical and psychological impressions left by traumatic experiences. Utilizing modalities of print media such as reflectivity and repetition, Vicious Cycle provides an analogous space in which to conceptualize the body, its memories, and its various psychologies. These prints and performances foreground the physical interactions that impress marks on paper as symbolic of the changes a body and mind undergo after experiencing trauma. The plates are punched, corroded, broken, screamed at, and disintegrated as a means of investigating the ways in which a body can be harmed through emotional and physical abuse.
The prints resulting from these performances represent the ways in which we continue to be affected by markers of experience long after the event has taken place. The work seeks to confront the silence surrounding traumatic events, mental illness, and the messiness of healing. Vicious Cycle ultimately calls into question the cyclical nature of violence – what is the mark of trauma and how does it unfold in individual experiences?