Shane Dedman

Shown at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design Gallery's Bachelors of Fine Arts Graduation Show on campus at Georgia State University in Fall 2016. 

Artist Statement:

This work deals primarily with trauma as a process. Freudian psychoanalysis stigmatized and dismissed feminized trauma, but over the past 50 years, PTSD associated with sexual abuse has come to be recognized as valid by the psychological community. I now ask the audience to take a step further, to consider trauma as a spectrum of unique personal experiences, which lead to individualized, rather than universal, systems of symbols.

Each piece is an externalized embodiment of resistance. Through the act of public catharsis, subjecting that catharsis to scrutiny, agency can be reclaimed over the body. One can cast off associations and assert autonomy, by drawing and denouncing the male gaze.

We have to think critically about victimhood/survivorhood. Is there some way for us to exist outside of the constraints of victimization and alienation? Are victims/survivors permitted to hold space? Do we have to create it? Or do we have to take it for ourselves?