Amy DiGennaro

Region: Midwest

My work explores mythologies white middle-class America creates through the history and institutions of childhood and family. Through my drawings, I investigate experiences of narrating family life, both personal and societal, in order to explore the development of identity, of individual and communal memory. I study the emergency of sexuality, subjectivity, and community through transitions like immigration, generational shifts, and familial and cultural legacies. I look for moments of disconnect between experience and perception, constructing visual tales of those points of slippage. I load the images to overflowing and often use the circularity of elaborate border work to suggest no exact starting or finishing point for the narrative, which is non-linear and layered.

The drawing is like a composite sketch, pulled from stories and found images, combining “original” and appropriated elements in order to illustrate something that has never been iterated. I want these drawing to echo the lived experience of these kinds of narratives in all their instability, murkiness, and subjectivity. I want to tell and retell stories, to open up and look at the way memory and forgetting intersects with history. I want to use this work to expose how the visual transforms narrative and how narrative is, in return, transformed by the artistic process.