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| Carrie Hoelzer Exhume 11"x11" Polaroid image transfers on silk, carbon drawings overlaid | Installed view | ||
| My work is an investigation into personal identity. The influence early childhood experiences have in shaping who we are, and how we define self, interests me. Questions in relation to personal space, spaces created to hold parts of the self, and issues of being a voluntary exile from one’s beginnings are raised. As part of a Diaspora, caught in psychological flux and migration, many of us lack a sense of home or a feeling of belonging. | |||
| In this sequence of Polaroid image transfers, I specifically explore the internal places where we all store, revisit, and re-experience the moments of our very early experience. The physical actions presented in the images, which unsetting and regressive at times, are referential to dysfunctional or pathological familial relationships. While these negative transformations serve to deliver the subject back to moments of anxiety and psychological unease, in hopes of reexamining, reorganizing, and potentially resolving less than ideal self-object relations; the knowledge that ‘home’ has been experienced as the root of emotional injury, versus a safe haven, is clear. The sense of fragmentation and disconnect that occurs in attempting to separate one’s ‘other’, who has been harmed and has integrated toxic perceptions and behaviors into the sense of self, from one’s ‘primary self’ is expressed. The experience of redefining and rebuilding self often leaves one caught in limbo, without any home to claim or return to. | |||