KARA SWEDLOW, PhD
I am interested by images in a painting that can convey several meanings simultaneously, much like in a dream, and how images are open to the unique interpretation of the observer based on the personal narrative they bring to the experience of viewing. My work as a psychoanalyst often shows itself in my painting through themes of psychic distress and its transformation, moments of presence or quietude, and within the strange humor of exaggerated figures.
We Spoke of Was and When
(Oil on Canvas, 36” x 24”)
This piece expresses one aspect of analytic listening in the fragmentary space of absence/presence due to the virtual platform that separates myself from patients in clinical work. Oddly, disembodiment is the backdrop to more intensified and disturbing realities of bodily vulnerabilities and anxieties. We are together, patient and analyst, and present, but also not able to be together, leaving a space which is arrhythmic and partial, surrounded by the encroachment of a felt sense of physical blindness.