Midwest Chapter ConferenceSpeakers

Rana Young

Saturday, October 08, 2022 @ 10:00am, Pavilion

Negotiating With a Ghost

Lie and Smile is an image-based series responding to my mother's archive and absence, through which I construct prosthetic memories to reinterpret her life and embalm her death. Since 2017, I've been investigating her lived experiences that led to parental abandonment, incarceration, and her persistence in concealing years of endured trauma. Amid my research, I frame versions of my mother I may confront or forgive to sustain my negotiation with her ghost. I produce diaristic constellations employing visual tension, and unstable transition, as projections of the past and future. Familial narratives aid me in rendering visual elegies to be investigated by a viewer, revealing the tension of uncertainty as I mine my mother's archive and matrilineal succession. As I retrace our history, I'm thinking of how my considerations might molt into visual metaphors for circumstances and underscore the precarious bond between photographic record and the fragmented, abstract nature of memory.

Rana Young is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the School of Art at the University of Arkansas. She earned her MFA in Studio Art from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she was an Othmer Fellow. Her work has been exhibited and published widely. Kris Graves Projects (Queens, NY) published her first monograph, The Rug's Topography, in 2019.