The Gifts of Adversity

Artists’ Statement

In our presentation, we set out to explore how we were affected by our parents, and how those circumstances benefited us in the long term. We wanted the piece to sound like a series of personal reflections, unified in their struggles through adversity, a collection of success stories despite the odds. It is deeply amazing to observe the resilience of humans, and to observe how our darkest times only make room for the greatest light. In this video essay, we wanted to show how our parents’ actions (or inactions) continue to influence and shape us in our everyday lives (for the better). Our writing was largely lyric essay style. There is some freeform poetry, but that is sandwiched between more verbose essay-style writing. We did this in order to tease out the specificity of our experiences, to boil down our trials to their most basic, visceral parts, in order to most effectively communicate. For our “video treatment” we each set off to take photos that took on the form of our everyday eye, capturing the things we see (and how we see them) and how we relate among those things, or how they affect us. We did accomplish what we set out to do. The silver lining amidst our turbulent pasts has been effectively relayed. As a group, it was most challenging to tie our experiences together coherently. We each had rather long personal narratives, so it was a challenge to whittle those down in a seamless, artistic manner. Additionally, it was a challenge to capture images that effectively encapsulated the very specific nature of our past experiences. Some of these feelings are so particular and so abstract, that to capture them in images found in the everyday proved to be a challenging endeavor. However, it was most rewarding to tie all these things together, to find the coherence in our stories and images, and to ultimately see where our stumbling led us in this creative process.

Artists

Paigerenee Torres, Danielle Perkins, Eric Newport, Preston Pulliam