Deanna Chilian

I am a multi-disciplinary artist who is constantly thinking about materiality and the mutable nature of space/time liminality. What happens in the interstices of time, space, matter, and light? Do we experience a life between lives? Where do we go when we dream, or stare off into middle space summoning an idea? And from where do those ideas come? I enjoy challenging my own constructs around these questions through my studio practices. Painting, installation, hand papermaking, collage, and non-traditional sculpture take me to where consciousness entangles with intangibles such as trauma, memory, resilience. The grand-daughter of genocide survivors, I am drawn to artists working from a lineage of diaspora and displacement, and to the importance of making art as an act of remembering in a culture increasingly obsessed with forgetting.

I imagine my studio as a laboratory rather than a production space, opening me to possibilities and leading me in more fruitful directions. Guided by questions around space, structures, layering, and transparency, my practice is low-key autobiographical. I possess a lifelong fascination with the elemental world, and how Nature can be a vessel for spirit, myth and memory. Therein lie tensions between the perception of what is real and the hidden worlds: sometimes silence and emptiness is anything but. I perceive Western concepts of time as ghostly constructs, haunted by distortion, fragmentation, indeterminacy, non-linearity, tragedy. In counterpoise to these ethereal concerns is my desire to capture what is visceral and exquisite.