BFA Solo Exhibition - Lydia Borko

Exhibition Dates: November 29-December 9, 2022

Unfolding

"Art is a habit of the intellect, developed with practice over time, that empowers the artist to make the work right and protects her...from deviating from what is good for the work. It unites what she is with what her material is. It leads her to seek her own depths. Its purpose is not her self-enhancement, her having fun or feeling good about herself. These are byproducts. It aims solely towards bringing a new thing into existence in the truest manner possible. It is about truth and, as such, has to do with ultimates and, as such, posits self-sacrifice and consecration." – Neil Sonneman on Martin Puryear, taken from the second page of Art On My Mind by Bell Hooks, pronouns changed from he/him to she/her.

I make art in an attempt to bring ideas, feelings, and experiences that exist inside my own body to the world outside my body. It is a direct action of turning the immaterial into something I can feel with my hands. There is a biological imperative within me to create, some kind of internal compass that, over and over again, points me where I need to go. Since the work comes directly from within, it is deeply personal to me, as if I've turned myself inside-out and invited all of you to look. At the same time, my goal is to instill enough life into it that it no longer needs me—enabling the work to connect with each viewer on their own terms without knowing me or my story.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about what is essential to humanity—what is the common thread between us despite our different experiences and cultures and beliefs. What is a statement we could make, something we could say about all people, that brooks no argument? The only thing I can say with any confidence is this: we have bodies.

We as humans are born into such breakable, smelly bodies, corporeal forms that are cursed (or blessed) with an intense need for connection that we cannot escape. We accumulate our identities over the span of our lifetimes, an intricate history of memory and experience. Everything that ever happens to us results in who we are at this exact moment, determining how we meet each other and the world around us. All of this information is held within our physical forms, while also manifesting as our physical forms. (Our thoughts are electrical currents, our emotions are chemicals, our memories are brain matter.)

I find within myself a tension between the dual realities of existing inside a body and as a body. I think it has something to do with the way our physicality is bound by time, but our identities are not. I think it has something to do with the line between my inside and my outside, that mesa of tectonic movement where I end and the world begins. The work in this room is my attempt to better understand the tension within myself, and to turn that intangible line between inside and outside into something I can see and touch and walk around. It is an attempt at making a space that only exists within myself accessible to all of you, in hopes of creating a common ground where we can navigate our bodily selves.