SOVA Senior Show 2

Self, Obsessed

My work expresses my feelings about self-identity and allows to be more comfortable in my own skin. From adolescence into young adulthood, I struggled with balancing obsession and mental stability, so I created a timeline of my experiences combined with material objects I kept close to me during that period of my life. This series is a shrine and dedication to both the celebrities I loved and the different people I have been in the past. Despite my difficulties being forward and outgoing, these photographs are large and unavoidable. Every detail, every insecurity about who I am and who I used to be, and every imperfection is blown up in scale in a way that is both confident and vulnerable.
I work with self-portrait photography because it helps me form a better relationship with myself. For the process of this work, I chose a photoshoot of a celebrity that I had an obsession with for a prolonged period during my teen-hood to early adulthood. I then recreated the photograph with my own personal narrative attached to it. In each piece, I left a small blank space to edit the original image of the celebrity back into my composition to show where my pose and expression came from.

 “Jessie Lee” Almquist, 2019

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Living With

I often find myself returning to the visual language of human anatomy. The internal structure of our bodies is something that is undeniably universal; we all share the same basic systems with the same risks of failure to varying degrees. I have found that there is something visceral and demanding in these images, especially when we walk the edge of gore and beauty, for the systems are beautiful in their way. These works draw on anatomy as a starting point for a very personal need to understand how our bodies fail us, how we live through grief when they fail in the absolute worst ways, and how we live in spite of chronic diseases that sometimes even medicine struggles to fully understand.

This process of reinterpreting scientific, longstanding medical diagrams allows me an entry point into exploring and understanding my personal feelings regarding such illnesses. The journalistic quality of the text in B. November 4, 1938: D. December 30, 2017 is a means of dealing with my grief following the sudden loss of my Grandfather due to Pancreatic Cancer. The diagrammatic labels and carefully rendered organs represent an attempt to understand the internal degradation that relates to my memories of those months. The structure of the cancerous cells drawn in pen further delve into the unseen mutation while also bridging together the paintings of the lumbar lymph nodes and the pancreas with its surrounding organs. This cell motif appears in 4th Generation in combination with dripped paint. These act as a corruption of a familiar space (our family farm) as a result of grieving. Throughout the works, this method of dripping paint also servers to limit my control, just as one might feel they can no longer control their body.

Together this series speaks to the fragility of the human body and the emotions that arise when faced with difficult illnesses.

 Emma Crim

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Infection

I often find myself returning to the visual language of human anatomy. The internal structure of our bodies is something that is undeniably universal; we all share the same basic systems with the same risks of failure to varying degrees. I have found that there is something visceral and demanding in these images, especially when we walk the edge of gore and beauty, for the systems are beautiful in their way. These works draw on anatomy as a starting point for a very personal need to understand how our bodies fail us, how we live through grief when they fail in the absolute worst ways, and how we live in spite of chronic diseases that sometimes even medicine struggles to fully understand.

This process of reinterpreting scientific, longstanding medical diagrams allows me an entry point into exploring and understanding my personal feelings regarding such illnesses. The journalistic quality of the text in B. November 4, 1938: D. December 30, 2017 is a means of dealing with my grief following the sudden loss of my Grandfather due to Pancreatic Cancer. The diagrammatic labels and carefully rendered organs represent an attempt to understand the internal degradation that relates to my memories of those months. The structure of the cancerous cells drawn in pen further delve into the unseen mutation while also bridging together the paintings of the lumbar lymph nodes and the pancreas with its surrounding organs. This cell motif appears in 4th Generation in combination with dripped paint. These act as a corruption of a familiar space (our family farm) as a result of grieving. Throughout the works, this method of dripping paint also servers to limit my control, just as one might feel they can no longer control their body.

Together this series speaks to the fragility of the human body and the emotions that arise when faced with difficult illnesses.

 Celeste Finelli