ARTIST STATEMENT
As the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, my work wrestles my forbears’ lack of security from my bones. The smell of Jewish yearning for safety sits at the roots of my hair. I adapt traditional Jewish ritual and use organic materials that speak to my body, anxiety, and family history (Hungarian paprika, gum, walnuts, cherry pits) to probe the tensions between safety and discomfort, paranoia and cautiousness, and what it means to be complicit. In investigating the way intergenerational trauma manifests in the rough, red edges of my skin, I interrogate the edges of my comfort zone and help myself heal.Taking an auto-ethnographic approach, I employ performance, installation, painting, and sculpture, among other mediums.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
I graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University with an A.B. in Anthropology and certificates in Visual Art and Chinese Language and Culture. I was recently awarded a Pollock Krasner Fellowship by the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, was the 2020 recipient of ChaNorth residency’s Young Artist Fellowship Award, and received Princeton University’s 2016 Herbert L. Lucas Award in Visual Arts for Sculpture. I have also presented and performed work as an artist-in-residence at Yellowfish Festival VI and at 77Art Center in Vermont, as well as at Satellite Art Club, Racer East, QSpace Beijing, and PIL Gallery Beijing, among others. Over the past several years my practice has been based in New Jersey, Xinjiang, China, and Beijing. Since 2020 I have been based in Brooklyn, New York.
© Amalya Megerman