Currently on watch at Harman Assignments in New York City right until January 7th, 2023 is artist Felicia Chiao’s solo exhibition, “Strange Ache.”
Having the familiar and skewing it in surreal means, Felicia Chiao
illustrates agonizing human emotion by creating visual representations of thoughts that can ordinarily only be professional. Irrespective of whether it be a home with no windows or the darkish bulbous personification of inner struggle, the “Strange Pain” referenced during the exhibition is obvious.
Chiao’s autobiographical work chooses to focus on vulnerable areas of what it means to be human. She produces worlds in which our concern, panic and melancholy surface as actual physical as they sense. Presented this new physical variety, they are illustrated as amorphous blobs sitting down on our laps pinning us down beneath the pounds of melancholy, as smothering stress and anxiety looming all over the subsequent corner, and as a pit in our belly when we can not uncover the drive to be productive as noticed in Lamp Light-weight, pictured higher than.
Loneliness persists in the course of this entire body of operate, the artist works by using singular lights shone on her figures in the course of night time scenes and shadows cast all through day scenes to fundamentally isolate them from the relaxation of their earth. Many others are seen gazing by way of their window at an exterior world that has come to be foreign to them, or struggling to come across the will to eat breakfast, these solitary beings obtain by themselves alone with their ideas.
Felicia Chiao states, “Weird Pain is about the little, undefinable pains you occasionally experience when nothing at all is specially incorrect. It can occur as that ache you come to feel from a unhappy music or that fleeting wave of despair that comes in excess of you while waiting for drinking water to boil. It can be the tightness in your chest before a social party or that obscure sense of guilt you sometimes get, even while you have performed absolutely nothing erroneous. Bizarre pains are hard to place into phrases but this human body of perform does its best to investigate them.”
Inspite of the at any time current feelings of despair, there are also attractive times that shine by means of and present an optimistic outlook. A tree mounting out of a making towards the solar, lushly blooming flowers, and fridge magnets reminding the viewer that “Its ok”.
