What is panic? Anxiety? Fear? What do these feelings look like? Torn Away is an attempt to recreate these intense, personal moments where, despite your rational mind telling you that everything is going to be okay, the remainder of your being is telling you that you’re exposed and vulnerable. Friends, acquaintances, and random strangers are suddenly all staring through you, finding your weaknesses, and judging you to be worthless. You may only be making light conversation but your gut is convinced that you’re being laughed at. Ridicule is hiding behind that smile and that friendly greeting and your instinct is telling you to run and to hide.
In Torn Away, I have collaged magazines to give form to these feelings. Magazines are part of our everyday life—flooding store shelves and mailboxes, they’re near inescapable—and, despite any individual experience with a particular magazine, millions of other people are having similar experiences with their own copy of the same magazine. Through this heavy saturation of media, the images, even if heavily edited, become a part of reality. They’ve been printed, purchased, held with real human hands, looked at with real human eyes, and have occupied parts of people’s lives—even if only for a few seconds. By cutting apart and pasting together these images, these fragments of reality, I can represent my internal experiences while keeping myself rooted in the outside world—one which we all share.
