I make artwork to explore sense perception.
The senses are bound up in the intellectual history of Western culture, and are frequently the stage upon which definitions of selfhood are drawn, unevenly, on different bodies through different moments in time. When considering conceptions of sense in various historical moments, we must ask: to whom did this apply? How do ideas about the senses confirm or exclude diverse bodies from the status of “human”? How do these ideas connect or alienate the human from the rest of nature?
Sensation is our native language. It is what weaves us into relationship with the world. The gesture of sensation is interdependence and reciprocity. Our bodies know this, yet culture has taught us a different story. The work of artmaking, for me, is to first notice the presence of that story, and then to feel my way out of it, drawing and sounding out new modalities for us all to explore.
My practice moves between drawing, painting, sound art, and writing. It is informed by research into cultural history, philosophy, metaphysics, human and non-human sense studies, speculative and feminist ecology, and multi-species research. My work before 2020 focused on bodies in transitional states of being. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted my focus from discrete bodies to the space around them.
In the waning light of 2020, faced with a quiet winter alone, I tuned into how the darkened, solo NYC nights affected my sensorium, and what new perceptions emerged. I made drawings, paintings and sound recordings of this new darkness. I overturned my own perceptions of figure and ground, presence and absence, questioning what it meant to perceive myself as a form at all. I wrote and taught online classes that reached out to other sensing bodies in the digital night through somatic drawing explorations. I returned to the books on sensation that I had read for my 2009 MFA thesis, which led me into deeper studies of phenomenology, theology, and astronomy. My winter was lonely but rich with books, the night and always, the moon.
We are in a cultural moment of acknowledging just how varied sense experience can be, depending on the forms of life we have been taught to embody. Alongside this, history has also shown us that, however individual and private they feel, senses are comprehended through consensus. Individual perceptions of the wildly disparate life worlds we may inhabit are shaped collectively. My current work celebrates and reflects on this, asking: how can we co-exist with the diverse human and more-than-human world in light of our contemporary night?
—Krista Dragomer, March 2022