Name: C. Bridget O’Rourke
Country Of Origin: USA
Country Now Residing: France
Title:
Displacement is universal. No one really belongs to a place because we all belong everywhere. Nonetheless, reality suggests otherwise and great suffering arises when humans pass through or escape from territories of economic, political and environmental hardship. Forced exile is tragic and is so widespread as to be easily ignored. As an immigrant living in France for the last decade I have experienced the sense of ‘otherness’ that occurs when one settles in a new homeland and to my good fortune I am not escaping terrible hardship.
My submission is an abstract, formal approach to representing displacement. The original work (oil on canvas, 164 × 130cm) is nearly devoid of color and contains 24 equidistant vertical lines that are interrupted and obscured by sweeping horizontal fields of paint. The order of the underlying verticals is disrupted by the collision of the opposing gestures; there is a physical displacement of the painted surface.
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