- Thalia Stefaniuk
Artists: Kaari Upson, Jes Fan, and Lucas Blalock
Weight of Mind questions how memory is embodied and given new form in the works of three artists: Kaari Upson, Jes Fan, and Lucas Blalock. In divergent ways, their works—across sculpture and photography—examine how past experiences are transformed through different methods of translation, from molding and casting to pigmentation to digital manipulation. By thickening fragmented memories or past sensations, the artists invite the audience to examine moments of change that otherwise would be fleeting.
Upson creates a forest of hanging limbs cast both from trees surrounding her childhood home and from her own body. Blalock mines his archive for images and bodies that he then extrudes, engulfs, and dematerializes through photo manipulation. Fan creates seductive opalescent sculptures that give organic form to inorganic material.
Bringing elusive facets of memory to life, the artists’ creations blur the lines between lived personal phenomena and the unseen experiences that shape our subjectivity.
The public program Pictures and Frames is a cinematic Frankenstein’s monster. Curated by Thalia Stefaniuk in collaboration with Lucas Blalock to accompany the exhibition Weight of Mind, this program of short films dismembers the body into different parts, mirroring the fragmented body parts in the exhibition, and examines them individually to construct a greater whole. The program acts as both an artwork and an experience, directly related to the exhibition. It includes footage of the exhibition and short interludes on each artist, creating a dialogue between the film program and the exhibition itself.
Pictures and Frames runs on April 7, 2024, 3–5 p.m., at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, NY. Please RSVP here.
Trailer directed by Thalia Stefaniuk, filmed and edited by Alec Simmons
