echo

Exhibition Dates: September 13, 2021 – January 23, 2022
Closing Reception: November 10, 2021 5:00 – 6:00 p.m.

echo; a collection of work by Nicci Arnold and Peytin Fitzgerald Memories reverberate through our lives and our families, connecting us through time and space. They are a powerful and inescapable part of the human experience. In sharing memories, we extend their echoes beyond ourselves and into the world. In this exhibition, Arnold and Fitzgerald explore documentation of memory in excess throughout times of personal and societal turmoil. Ultimately, delving into this topic leads to personal growth. Arnold’s work uses representational imagery of her surrounding objects and narrative to examine the processing of emotion, while Fitzgerald’s abstract pillow forms and embroideries grasp at overwhelming sensations of memory to help manage trauma that resides within the body. Although the artists’ methods of recording and recalling memory differ, both Arnold and Fitzgerald use pattern, detail, and the expansive media of printmaking to share and blend their individual experiences. In my work, I focus on the spaces that surround me and the objects that inhabit them.

By translating documentation of my daily life into the language of woodcut, I preserve moments that tell a complex story of family, separation, and growth. The woodcut process allows me to infuse each scene with an expressive quality through mark and pattern. The method of carving is highly therapeutic for me, a way to better understand and memorialize the journey my blended family continues to tread through a pandemic and multiple long-distance relationships. By highlighting these several scenes, I hone in on the moments that have felt most unsettling to me, which allows for deeper reflection on the times I have spent in solitude over the past year and a half. -Nicci Arnold

With trauma, your brain and body chooses when to hold onto a memory and when to not. These relations are repetitive in imagery and in motion throughout my work. While creating, I discovered space for shared trauma in underlying conversations between me and the bodies that have surrounded me throughout my life. In response, I offer memories and emotions in shape. Each one is tied to a specific sensation from events that have left a lasting impact on who I am today. I look at ways to abstract these sensations in excess and imply that there was once a body present. I do so by conveying feelings of otherness, vulnerability, or disassociation from body and self. -Peytin Fitzgerald