Natalie Park • Emma Stoolmaker

Art Education BFA Exhibition

Kresge Art Center, Gallery 101

March 21 – March 25, 2022

Reception: March 25, 7:00PM – 9:00PM

Natalie Park

I most often work in layers as a way of building up imagery and information, to reflect the complex layers that compose memory, the feminine experience, and our identities. Portions disappear as others are realized. My process is slow yet the final result is not predetermined. I respond to the images as they are created; past marks influence what has yet to happen. In this, I have begun to consider the implications of time and understand my paintings to contain past, present, and future.

Emma Stoolmaker

All beings of past and present have disassembled and reassembled to create us. We contain fractals of life that came before and blueprints for what and who will come after us. Living in this spontaneous arrangement of the universe, we are inexplicably constructed to construct others.

Acting not only as a making process, collage entails a methodology and larger framework through which I see the world. It is inherently democratizing, piecing together fragments of available media to produce new meaning, often destabilizing hierarchies in many forms of fine art. Both removing and producing context from its source material, collage is inherently narrative.

Exploring themes of spiritual and religious identity, the ownership and learned presentation of femininity, and the ongoing cultural exchanges between generations of women, I hope to expose the patchworked nature that describes our sense of self and shared humanity.

Through these reorganized fractals I write my own history, leaving new stories to be spoken, shared, and reconfigured by the generations that succeed me.