Katie Tam

My art practice hones in on my life experiences and memories as they relate to being an Asian American woman, and person in the world. I gravitate towards ideas and subjects that have a strong emotional impact. I think about how these experiences can have connections to cultural and emotional symbols, and how they can live on within a person.

My work is both a meditative and therapeutic process, with my recent expressions stemming from the young adult experience, as I navigate those experiences and realizations through the lens of my intersecting identities. In combination with my fixation on illustrated objects and figures in time, I am fascinated with space, material and texture. This obsession becomes a meditative practice, a rhythm of laying paint down and line drawing as a method of relieving the tension of my mind. Emotional tension is revealed through contrasts of texture, line, and color.  Mark vacillates between messy and urgent to thin transparent strokes, revealing the layers of marks that came before it. Illustrative components are carefully composed to reveal deeper meanings. These paintings and drawings take on an archeological quality, in which multiple images are found and lost in an ever changing space of representation and experience.