Artospective: Drawings by Tricia Butski from Buffalo, New York.

Fission

An Interview with Tricia Butski.

Who and from where are you?

My name is Tricia Butski. I’m an artist living and working in Buffalo, NY.

How you got into this?

This series of work, titled‘Semblance’, stemsfrom a long period of trial, error, and experimentation. I worked through many tentative processes attempting to consolidate my thoughts on memory, preservation, and forgetting into a visual form. The biggest challenge I faced was expressing a subject that is in constant flux using a fixed medium. Though the imagery is static, I found that the drawings work together as a group, creating a cinematic effect through a sequence of progressive distortions in which the viewer’s gaze shifts from large scale to small, between the figure and the fragment.

What is your driving force?

My driving force is ultimately a distinct compulsion to create and to make a living through my creative process.

What kind of work you do and why?

I primarily work with drawing, using charcoal as my medium and the human figure as my subject. My work involves representations of the figure that lie in between hyperrealism and abstraction. The medium of charcoal serves as a material analog for impermanence, fragility, and malleability. I’ve found that it best articulates my thoughts about memory, not only for technical and aesthetic reasons, but also because of its origin. The medium consists of dead organic matter that is condensed, preserved, and then reanimated through drawing, speaking to the human recollection process.

Artist Statement

Through drawings rendered in charcoal, ‘Semblance’ examines issues related to memory by exploring its limitations and aestheticizing the instability inherent in portraiture. The work allows the viewer to enter the subconscious space between remembering and forgetting. The figures and faces, which have been distorted through a repetitive layering process, manipulate our sense of familiarity. The original image becomes fragmented through this process, a conceptual procedure that corresponds to the experience of forgetting the semblance of the face, the body, and the subject. Through distortion and fragmentation, the figures take on a monstrous form. The familiarity of the face evokes comfort while simultaneously rousing a sense of distress. This creates an intermediary form that inhabits a space both real and imagined. The resulting image is neither entirely original nor fully invented, taking form as a realistic rendering of a fleeting moment. By challenging the boundaries between representation and abstraction, and questioning the relationship between fluctuation and constancy, the works become entangled and disordered, mirroring the viewer’s innate desire for clarity and their proclivity for drawing meaning out of partiality.