Kaitlin Botts
www.kaitlinbotts.com
www.kaitlinbotts.com
Sorrow #16, Archival Inkjet Print, 40" x 60" 2019
Sorrow #8, Archival Inkjet Print, 16" x 40" 2019
Sorrow #13, Archival Inkjet Print, 16" x 40" 2019
Sorrow #11, Archival Inkjet Print, 30" x 40" 2019
Sorrow #9, Archival Inkjet Print, 30" x 40" 2019
This exhibition encompasses two different but interrelate bodies of work, Exquisite Proof and Sorrow Without Name. Exquisite Proof is a series of photographic works addressing themes of mental health, the family, loss, and absence and exquisite moments found/fabricated within these events. My husband was first gradually and then abruptly taken from our family through the use of prescribed anti-anxiety medications. Gradually his personality, his demeanor, and his ambition were taken away from him and replaced with an apathetic, disengaged, dramatically changed individual. This occurred over the course of years being prescribed medications in an attempt to manage his anxiety. This was a slow-moving traumatic event that impacted the lives of our family dramatically. He was abruptly taken from our family when he discontinued his use of these medications which resulted in brain and nerve damage, disabling him for years. During this time, I created images that documented this event quite literally through photographs that depicted both his absence in our family’s lives due to his disability and images that allowed me to articulate my own pain and sorrow at these events in a more abstracted, ephemeral manner. My photographs push and pull against one another, through providing information and withholding it simultaneously. They speak of trauma and beauty within the same framework.
In the spring of 2018, my father died tragically and suddenly. I am unmoored by this event. Sorrow Without Name continues the dialogue between the concept of documentation and an abstraction of these experiences, both through photographic processes and the intimacy of the private journal. Sorrow Without Name is about being lost, unmoored, floating beyond the edges of what I previously knew. The work meanders but still focuses on the relationship between the literal and the abstract. Exquisite Proof/Sorrow Without Name bleed into one another, blurring the boundaries between current and past events.
In the spring of 2018, my father died tragically and suddenly. I am unmoored by this event. Sorrow Without Name continues the dialogue between the concept of documentation and an abstraction of these experiences, both through photographic processes and the intimacy of the private journal. Sorrow Without Name is about being lost, unmoored, floating beyond the edges of what I previously knew. The work meanders but still focuses on the relationship between the literal and the abstract. Exquisite Proof/Sorrow Without Name bleed into one another, blurring the boundaries between current and past events.