The Weight

My senior thesis titled, “The Weight”, is about the collective trauma experienced as a result of the pandemic. I wanted to create artwork that is synonymous with the time period we are living in right now, taking heavy influence from movements such as post-war contemporary art and Dadaism. I chose to do a mixture of collage and digital painting. I wanted to use media from the past to show the connections to our present. I see many parallels in what we are experiencing to the past traumas of war, political unrest, economic depression, and systematic violence. Many pieces touch on my thoughts on current events, but a bulk of them are surrounding grief. Grief became huge throughout my work, because I understand the pain of losing someone you love, and at the time of writing this worldwide we have lost over two million people to COVID. There is a loneliness and weight that comes with grief and I hope that people who view my work may feel a little less alone.