Aimee Wissman

I’m being driven by a longing for justice, a need to make something come from my/your/our trauma, and to be (perhaps) released in the making.

I use a variety of materials, but my first interest is in the surface. Through working things over, sometimes furiously, almost always over long stretches of time, I create a sense of depth and spectacle. The surface, the micro to the macro of the painting, is one way I’ve learned to talk about all the little details of something like mass incarceration.

I frequently use a symbolic language to talk about erasure, dehumanization, and oppression. Uniforms, numbers, chains, razor wire, interior/exterior carceral spaces, collide with bridges, trains, tunnels, and parks. I see no difference in the construction and I see many similarities in intent. The figurative work dives deeper: body as raw material, our enslavement to capitalism and carceral states, and finally, the body’s return to dust, to brick, to block, to stone.

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