Here:There
Quinn Rockliff
Project Description
here:there is an autoethnographic installation that explores how the artist turns to social media to talk about her experience as a survivor of sexual assault. Acrylic self-portraits and their shadows highlight the precarity between the boundaries of physical and virtual embodiment that occur when justice is sought online through self-representation and reflection. The work uses abstraction in order to reject the expectation for survivors to expose their trauma in detail to gain access to validation. Quinn does so by prioritizing nuances over truths, emotional vulnerability over strength, and difference over essentialism. here:there is situated within contemporary feminist art practices, work that moves towards expressionist autoethnography to create critical, transparent, and nuanced representations of the self.
BIO
Quinn Rockliff is an interdisciplinary feminist artist. Her subject matter largely consists of nude self-portraits that contemplate sexuality and reclamation through self-representation. As a Master of Fine Arts candidate at OCAD U her thesis work explores the way that as a survivor of sexual assault, social media can be used as a healing tool, unpacking the precarity of the boundary between virtual and physical embodiment. First working in simple yet dynamic expressions of form in ink and watercolour, her practice has expanded off the page to sculpture, installation art, tattoo design, and various digital mediums.