Statement
To go through a traumatic experience is to subject your body to feelings of extreme distress, greatly affecting your mental and physical well-being. These events, whether they are a one-time occurrence or a prolonged experience, tend to be unforgettable memories forever implanted in the individual’s mind. However, when recalling my own personal experiences, I’ve found that my memory fails me. I have a difficult time remembering the details of my past traumatic events, often leaving me feeling confused and wondering: Did these things actually happen to me? Is it possible to remember something my mind has already made me forget?
My work explores these questions through painted photographs, finding the connections between trauma and memory and using art as a vessel for this raw, intangible experience. I paint overtop of photographs to blur the line between reality and delusion, emphasizing the human experience as a body goes through distress. Often, when trying to recall my experiences of childhood abuse and toxic relationships, my mind reconstructs these painful moments in a reliably unreliable manner, presenting glimpses that slip between clarity and distortion. I use paint as the act of remembering; color bleeds into form, disfiguring the reality of past events, as memory often does—sometimes vivid, sometimes faded, yet always reconfigured by the emotional imprint of trauma.
I seek not to represent trauma, but rather to embody the oscillating nature of remembering. In this exploration, I invite the viewer to witness not just the remnants of the past, but the shifting landscape of its recollection—a landscape marked by the simultaneous beauty and anguish of what is remembered, and what remains elusive.
Bio
Zoe Blum is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is focused on her personal experiences surrounding the themes of trauma, memory, and mental health. Her painted photographs reflect how memory is altered as a body goes through distressing events, emphasizing feelings of confusion, disorientation, and curiosity. Blum currently resides in Cincinnati attending the University of Cincinnati’s DAAP program, on her way to earn a BFA with a certificate in photography. She has had work shown in a number of exhibitions in the Tabula Rasa Gallery in Cincinnati and has collaborated with companies such as IKEA and Cummins, Inc in her professional experience. Blum continues to explore how paint can alter the context of photography in her work, and investigates how paint can be a vessel for remembering.