Department of Art
Accepting the past does not mean you have to relive it in a constant loop. I acknowledge and validate childhood trauma by creating pieces that act as a record of my past feelings, whilst confronting how I view those experiences now. I use humanized animal characters, distorting them to emphasize specific emotive qualities such as shame, fear, or vulnerability. Rats are a recurring motif that function as a proxy to communicate the internal, disjointed identity I experienced. My past issues with identity are still present, but quieter in my mind. I employ drawing, printmaking, and painting to express emotive mark making and divisionist brushwork to visualize the chaotic, unresolved nature of my current and past feelings.
Chana Stern is a digital artist and painter from New Jersey. They are a Senior in the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Stern uses rapid Staccato brush strokes in their acrylic paintings to record the feelings they held in their past. They also use methodical line work in their computer art to communicate the narrative of their pieces. Stern uses their experiences of being brought up in an ultra-orthodox religious community to convey the discomfort of being seen, closed in, and trapped from oneself or outside sources they experienced as a child. These influences give their pieces the uncanny look of gruesome adult subjects depicted through a naive lens.
