Rachelle Wunderink

MFA IN VISUAL ARTS, YORK UNIVERSITY

Blankouts, Trauma Embodied & That Thing

Society censors, rather than confronts, stories of rape and harassment. Rachelle Wunderink’s thesis work unveils the consequences of sexual assault trauma by forcing viewers to engage with the emotional affect. She does this in three key ways throughout her body of work: Blankouts, an immersive wheat-pasted installation, which looks at the covert ways in which society suppresses women’s stories of assault through the use of coded language and censorship. Secondly, Trauma Embodied, looks at how the artist self-censors her own stories through a multi-layered editing process of eight different videos. Lastly, in Wunderink’s thesis exhibition, That Thing: Confronting Difficult Trauma, the artist activates the gallery space creating various modes of interaction with the work engaging her audience to consider the ways in which the work imprints on their own experiences.

View the exhibition images below

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Rachelle Wunderink is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, and is currently based in Hamilton. Her interests take her through a variety of motifs dealing with trauma, affect theory, and the femme experience. While traditionally a painter, her work recently diverges from this discipline, as she explores video and installation as a means to convey the affect of trauma. Over the past 10 years she has co-founded two separate artist collectives working mostly abroad in Taipei, Taiwan and Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Website: rgwunderink.com