About the Artist

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    Sarah Kunen; As a multi-media artist working in drawing, painting, installation, performance, video, and photography, I encourage the viewer to empathize with others. My work brings to light the elusive and imperceptible space between the incomplete and complete because it is within this gray space that we expect of ourselves and others exists. I allow our flaws and frailties reflect our human condition and validate its testimony. My ambition is to reclaim agency over the realities of womanhood, sexuality, the self, and socioeconomic by allowing fallibility to be a vital part of what makes us whole.

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    My work is figural more than figurative. Even when I draw or paint the figure, I work gesturally, allowing the figure to focus more on its emotional resonance rather than anatomical features. The line work and tonal changes push-and-pull the figure into and out of the background. Distorting the figure helps focus it on the emotional context. I work to arrest a moment in time, as with our memory, it is ephemeral, and fades back and forth in materiality and psychological absence and presence. No matter the media I am working with, I create from a narrative space.

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    Employing the “confessional” is one step in many of sharing narrative. I explore more specifically love, trauma, cycles of abuse, relationships, death, addiction, and growth, all through the lenses of absence and presence. I search for an understanding of our contradictions. These contradictions, imperfections, and voids are an inherent and essential part of our existence. Through autobiographical and shared stories, I manifest the multi-faceted nature of human existence.