Champaign, IL 61820
217-356-7955
rfitzsim@uiuc.edu
http://r.fitzsimmons.home.insightbb.com/
Artist Bio
Memory, discomfort with contemporary cultural perceptions, and the passage of time are all frequent themes that appear in the work of Rebecca Fitzsimmons. Her methods of working range from traditional photographs and mixed-media pieces to digital images that are carefully manipulated using original images and sometimes images appropriated from popular culture. Her work does not seek to represent the world as it exists, but rather to present a reality that is constructed and re-constructed from various disparate pieces. Fitzsimmons' work has appeared in several group and solo exhibitions in Illinois New York City, and Upstate New York. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Syracuse University and is working towards a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Artist Statement
Reality, or the way we perceive the world around us each day interests me only in so far as I can examine the forces at work behind our creation of such perceptions. As such, my work often focuses on images that have been altered, constructed, re-constructed, and filtered through a mixture of memory and emotion. A photograph of a bleak landscape, for instance, is less about recording a mundane scene from my daily existence than it is about creating an image that envelopes the viewer in the impossibility of it's color, intensifying feelings of loneliness and alienation- the knowledge that the passage of time has been interrupted. There is a disquieting feeling that the scene is both horrible and sublime, but always beyond the reach of authentic experience.
Other pieces focus on real-time events in a way that isolates a specific moment or view that challenges our ideas of how an image/event/moment unfolds. Images of perfectly painted lips, an icon in our culture of fashion, beauty, and perfection, for example, are held up for scrutiny when photographed with a close-up lens. Instead of viewing these photographs with pleasant detachment the viewer is confronted instead with the grotesque size of the lips and the reality of magnified imperfections. The ideal that is created by society in this instance is one that denies the existence of pores, hairs, and blemishes, and yet the unflinching eye of the camera emphasizes the reality that no matter how well groomed one may be, perfection is ultimately unattainable. In this case the distortion lies not in the manipulation of reality, but in magnifying the uneasiness viewers may feel when forced to actually focus on the real.
While these seemingly opposite methods of working (one altering reality, the other magnifying it) may seem at odds with one another, each really focuses on the same goal- to rupture the way we see ourselves and our movements and experiences in the outer world.
