Individual trauma. Collective trauma. Emotional trauma. Physical trauma. Sexual trauma. We exist in a deeply traumatic moment in our world’s history. Perhaps in response to the traumatic state of affairs, various artists have tried to address and dissect trauma in their works this year. Filmmaker Ari Aster’s masterful horror film debut Hereditary examined how mental illness and familial trauma are fatalistically handed down from generation to generation. Noise musician Lingua Ignota conjures the demons she faces in response to her longtime experience with domestic abuse into a violently intense and bleak catharsis in her performances. Filmmaker Luca Guadagnino’s divisive (though, in my opinion, utterly gorgeous) remake of Dario Argento’s horror masterpiece Suspiria could be read as an ode to the power of personal rebellion for overcoming historical trauma. New York-based visual artist KS Brewer has also centered her recent work around the concept of trauma. Her recent installation curated by Gabrielle Aruta at her space Filo Sofi Arts, Doubled Up In Your Image, uses sculpture, video, painting, sound and scent to manifest internalized traumas that are both personal to her but also vague enough to tap into the collective unconscious of her viewers. “I want this to be a space where people bring their personal associations and be something that can apply to people in their own lives,” says Brewer.
In the lower level of the gallery, Brewer constructed what could best be described as, perhaps, a inverse reality dreamscape iteration of a fairly standard bedroom: bed, mirror and vanity, closet, etc.. And despite that familiarity, a pervasive sense of unease permeates the space. This balancing act between the mundane and the macabre places Brewer’s piece firmly within the canon of the uncanny. In the essay that accompanied the exhibition that he curated at London The Uncanny, the late artist Mike Kelley defines the uncanny as “a somewhat muted sense of horror” that is connected to the déjà vu. Brewer’s Doubled Up In Your Image uses vague a collective familiarity to trigger viewers’ personal experiences and traumas. “There’s something very dramatic about trauma,” says Brewer. “I’m very interested in how people experience inside of themselves and I think trauma has a lot to do with that.”
A theoretical inhabitant occupies Brewer’s constructed living space. No one in particular, just a manifestation of your troubled memories, perhaps, or possibly an even more opaque, indefinable anxiety that all lives beneath the surface of our day to day experiences. Brewer likens that negative forces as “narcissistic energy.” This could be the perpetrator of a traumatic act, or the residual echos of that trauma that force an individual to withdraw into themselves and their pain. This notion is enforced in the installation in a mirror that reflects your image distorted and buried. The objects suggests the trauma’s ability to render yourself unrecognizable to your self. “By not seeing your face it could have something to do with depersonalization,” says Brewer. “Also derealization, where you don’t have a sense of reality anymore.”
A flickering light permeates the installation that almost feels like a headache inducing, repellant force. The light is actually translated from a female (Brewer’s) screaming voice, “Get out of my room!” We don’t hear the voice, we just see and feel the light, but nevertheless that idea still resonates. This effect is a technical trick in which the volume of the audio forces the flickering of the light. “So the flickering of the light is actually the fluctuation of volume in the voice as it speaks,” says Brewer. “The female character that inhabits the room is like a ghost - unseen and unheard but still fighting to make her presence known.”
The installation’s use of sound scapes works cinematically. The sounds, designed by Keyhan Kamelian, build tension and force the viewer to grasp at hope for some imminent catharsis. The melancholy effect is largely achieved through the cello, its lovely hum provided by Brewer’s grandmother in another attempt to tap into a collective trauma by examining a personal and familial trauma: “The cello is a single lone voice that, in the soundscape, acts like a solitary person, perhaps a trauma survivor, someone struggling, who is uplifted over the course of the music by this choir - a collective, supporting voice ensuring the solitary one is not alone,” says Brewer. In fact, much of the installation’s narrative elements are inspired by Brewer’s mother’s childhood trauma, and the installation charts three generations of shared familial trauma: Brewer’s, her mother’s, her grandmother’s.
Overlooking the bed is a floral painting that resembles poppies. Poppies, opium, and opiates all work as a fairly coherent metaphor. In The Odyssey, Odysseus arrives at the Island of the Lotus Eaters where he is faced with a decision: he can continue his journey home (and effectively face the trauma that he endured and the trauma that he is still yet to endure) or luxuriate in the deep warmth and glow of the apathy produced by the consumption of the lotus flowers. Opiates are currently America’s lotus flowers of choice. Through this rather simply rendered floral painting, Brewer presents her audience with a choice: face the trauma and try to reconcile the pain, or self-medicate and dull the pain. Keep it at bay, but never really overcome it.
The final aspect of the exhibition asks the viewer to enter into a hole carved out of the bed top. Inside the bed cave, Brewer presents a video projection and peaceful audio accompaniment in which her own body is lied on its front and faced away from the camera as smoke gently exfoliates from its flesh. A reconciliation here is offered. Of course there is no way for any exhibition to yield any real kind of emotional catharsis. Instead, this reconciliation offers hopeful analysis. Trauma is omnipresent and unavoidable, but it also can be confronted and healed from. Though darker than much of Brewer’s previous work, Doubled Up In Your Image still suggests the artist holds something of an optimistic world view.
Doubled Up In Your Image’s interweaving of sounds and symbols could form something close to a story structure. In all honesty, I am generally not interested in visual art with clear narrative arcs; I’ve always felt like visual art should be oblique and elicit a feeling and that stories should be left for literature and narrative cinema. And yet I did very much respond to Brewer’s work, perhaps that is because the story that is elicited from the installation is developed almost entirely within the viewer’s imagination. Sure, there are elements that can not be altered: a room, a protagonist, an antagonist, a climax, and a reconciliation. But beyond that, the viewer is left entirely to fill in the blanks and the resultant story can be totally different depending upon whom experiences the installation. Much like Mike Kelley’s brilliant Fortress of Solitude installation, Brewer’s work generally does sit somewhere between narrative and suggestive, and that proposition feels fresh and alive.