An Introduction to Resilience: Art and Design in Times of Uncertainty

We often think of Resilience as toughness: the ability to overcome, to persevere, to recover from difficulties. Our challenges are to be conquered and left behind. It’s the ability to not let our stories and our setbacks define us.

In actuality, this definition is incomplete. Resilience is not simply overcoming; this idea of challenges as something that we simply “get through” in a linear projection neglects the very forces that make us who we are: memory, change, and the ability to adapt. Our traumas shape our routines, belief systems, and the way we relate to one another.

2020 was a year of pause. The collective shock created the pandemic rippled through the rest of our social fabric and trickled down into our most personal lives. It was a call for transformation with respect to every area of our lives. Who are we when we are alone? What are our places in society? How can we become part of something bigger than ourselves?

This exhibition is a response to the ongoing sense of uncertainty that we continue to carry in a “post”-pandemic world and it brings together artists from a variety of mediums and backgrounds to share the new resilience they have been building over the last two years. In a world where the desire to relate and connect with one another has been amplified, this exhibition bridges new connections and relationships between young artists from different colleges across Philadelphia.

Several artists in this exhibition explore resilience through a socioeconomic and historical lens. Storm “X” Brewer’s Soul Holder speaks for the collective trauma shared by people of color. At a time when more serious conversations related to systemic racism are coming to surface, this work responds to the lack of body autonomy given to the Black community. An extremely personal piece, Soul Holder brings attention to ongoing violence towards people of color through an interruption. As Storm put, “my ashes and my locs must be placed in this vessel since people of color, for so many years, were not able to decide where their bodies resided let alone where their soul resided.”

In Nian Ye Fan (“New Year’s Eve Dinner”), Hainuo Shi portrays a collective sense of hope and isolation as part of her Shamate series. The Shamate began as a marginal group in China but grew in popularity during the 2000s and early 2010s. They primarily consisted of post-90s migrant workers or children of rural migrant workers who formed family clans on the internet and migrated to cities, birthing a countercultural, non- mainstream aesthetic movement. The Shamate were one of the first aesthetic internet subcultures that arose in China. Commonly known for their spiked hair, bold makeup, and statement-making, gothic fashion, The painting depicts four Shamate sitting around a round yellow table, symbolizing the full moon and a state of waiting and hoping for reunion with their family for the holiday, according to Shi. The bold colors and style of the women contrast with a sense of longing and neglect; despite their shared resilience through their belonging in this subculture, they also experience loneliness after separation from their lower-class upbringing. Although their rejection of their socioeconomic status gave birth to the aesthetic, it also left them neglected and continually marginalized.

Another recurring aspect of resilience throughout this exhibition is abstraction as reflection of adaptation. In
her series The Content of Memory, Amy Krimm examines resilience through the lens of familial memory. Taking film photographs from her father’s childhood, she cross stitches over the faces of her relatives and fragments of the landscapes to create a pixelated effect. This process of embroidery simultaneously obstructs and brings attention to the image, demonstrating how memories and narratives transform over time. While the cross stitches add a third dimension to these images, they also hide the preexisting details, similar to how the nuances of memories are forgotten over time. Remembrance is not a process of passivity, but an active alchemization of the stories that came before us. As put by Krimm, “Embroidery itself is an act of resilience.”

Similar to The Content of Memory, Sudeep Bhargava’s Distortions: Bucks County no.1 explores this notion of interaction as manipulation with respect to nature. Using a 35mm color photograph, Bhargava manipulates an image of trees and prints it onto a 40-inch silk panel, transforming the original image into an abstraction. As put by the artist, this process “resists definition […] blurring the lines between image creation and reproduction.” He also raises the question of whether this abstraction is “decorative” or documentary, highlighting the extractive nature of human interactions with nature. This process of abstracting the natural world creates distance between our ideas of nature and the reality of the relationships between humans and the environment. In this way, Bhargava brings attention to how our collective environmental destruction intrudes into our own psyches.

Spyglass offers a more optimistic take on our relationships with nature. In this painting transformed through digital editing, Kate Coyne collages images and patterns from natural and man-made environments to create a colorful kaleidoscope that synthesizes elements of urban and natural landscapes. Coyne mentions how moving to Philadelphia from her rural upbringing leaves her feeling disconnected and out of place in the urban environment. “Spyglass is a representation of a realization–a realization that no matter where I find myself, I can define my experience and shape my environment. I can choose to see nature in the unnatural, and I can begin to create the unnatural from nature. We see what we choose to, but in the end, everything is just earth and sky,” describes the artist.

This selection of works featured in Resilience: Art and Design in Times of Resilience is displayed along with additional works by ten other young artists including Alan Jinich and Max Strickberger, Ash Garner – THECOLORG, Eleanor Shemtov, Hannah Pacitti, Kristina Denzel Bickford, Lara Bros, Neill Jordan Frianeza Catangay, Kate Coyne, Laura Li, and Talia Valentini.

From an oral history archive to experimentation with AI, works in this exhibition highlight the multifaceted nature of resilience and the range of ways in which we respond to hardship. These artists alchemize their stories into new expressions of personal and collective narratives. They show that what’s important is not what happens to us, but what we do with it.