by Bob Bahr member, Prairie Village Arts Council People look at school shootings in a number of different ways. Artist and teacher Aimee Fresia, whose work is now showing in the Meadowbrook Park Clubhouse under the auspices of the Prairie Village Arts Council, finds one aspect of school shootings particularly vexing and neglected: the memory of the teachers and staff who died. "Is it that we are all so busy and there's so much media that it gets pushed to the back of our brains?" Fresia asks. "These are normal people who should be remembered and revered for what they did and what happened to them. It's just become so accepted."
Fresia's piece "Homage to Those Who Went Before Us," which depicts 18 victims of school shootings, jumps out at the viewer, the portraits of the 18 people pulling us in. Words painted into the background help tell the story and help cement our interest and curiosity. The portraits themselves are each small works of art, painted on various materials and placed together in a collage of acrylic paint and layered pieces. Crucially, the portraits break down at the bottom of each, disintegrating into bits (or metaphorical bytes) of information. "Those bits of information are slowly going away," Fresia says. "No one is thinking about what happened in May 2000. No one thinks about the individual cases anymore. They are just disintegrating." Closer examination of "Homage to Those Who Went Before Us" reveals Fresia's process, but the effect is complicated. It's clear that the making of this piece was painstaking. Fresia says she had to do it in chunks of time because of its emotional intensity. She utilized gelli printing to get some of the effects, and her surfaces ranged from tissue paper to Bristol board to multimedia paper, but her preferred surface was a thin vellum paper. She built each portrait in layers from bare skin to hair to clothing. Her tools were Xacto blades, scissors, acrylic paint, and monoprinting. And most important, she learned about each one of the victims. "I love research, so I researched how many teachers had died since I started teaching in 2000," says Fresia. "The number was 700, but by the time I painted them, it was more. I was just doing facts--I looked up articles that were factual about violence in America. Old School journalism, no opinions. My thought was that this was all just digital information, all getting lost in the digital arena. It took a long time to research them. Then I thought about what colors I needed. I thought about who each one was as a person. I went to their obituary and in memoriam pages to see who had a dog, what they liked to read, what long vacation they were looking forward to." Careful viewers may notice that some pieces that make up the collage are dangling, torn, or missing. Fresia is pragmatic about it. "Some of it will be repaired and some of it won't," she says. "I feel like there's a realness to that, but when it comes back from a gallery or show, I make a decision about how much to repair and how much to leave. It is an imperfect situation." Gun violence can be a polarizing topic, but Fresia says she hasn't gotten much pushback…at least on this piece. Her work does tend toward the topical. The tradition of artists tackling social issues is a long one. "I think it is important, that it is important work. I read in a book that if somebody lives through something terrible, the least you can do is read about it. It's not that much to ask for someone to look at a piece of art for what, ten seconds? "I try to make art that is more truthful than journalism. I double checked facts--even facts that were sourced from the government," Fresia says. The viewer can sense this. It is part of the power of the piece. See "Homage to Those Who Went Before Us," along with other pieces by Fresia and work by Lisa Healey and Jean McGuire, at the Clubhouse in Meadowbrook Park, on Nall Avenue at Somerset Drive, through March 8.
1 Comment
Jessica
1/13/2025 08:31:44 am
Thank you for telling Aimee's story. It gives so much more meaning to her art.
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