An exhibition by second year MFA Candidate, Sophia Hoersten

September 28-October 9 | October 8, 6-8pm

Kresge Art Gallery 114, 600 Auditorium Rd. East Lansing, MI

 This past year was the first time my siblings and I found ourselves living in three different states: Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana. Sister, Sister processes this deeply personal but strangely universal experience of a family circle diffusing as its members assimilate into the larger world. It’s a reckoning with the familiarities of an old life and a foraging ahead into a new one, examining the complexities of sibling relationships across time, circumstance, and geographical distance. 

My work revisits the annual beach vacation and recurring holidays as moments of sudden collision, when we return to a shared physical space after living separate lives. These moments create an impact between the present and the accumulated history of our shared childhood, jolting our individual selves back into a collective sense of identity. I consider how we’ve become informed by one another through shared languages, hierarchies, systems of morality, senses of humor, and identities developed within siblinghood. These systems become so deeply internalized that they raise questions about who I am when extracted from this tight-knit dynamic. What parts of me are constructed through this shared history, and what parts emerge through my interactions with the world beyond our sibling circle? 

Through figurative painting, drawing, and ceramic work, I explore how memory preserves and challenges our understanding of these relationships. In my paintings and drawings, areas of heightened rendering and chroma emerge from passages of diminished detail and negative space, moving between resolve and unresolve. In my ceramic work, the painted image extends across a physically constructed form with volume, weight, and interior/exterior surfaces, allowing me to explore recurring experiences, patterns, loops, and unsettled memories. 

Within these memories, another person’s recollection can reinforce or destabilize our own. We depend upon one another to retell shared experiences, becoming memory keepers for histories that might otherwise dissolve with time. In Sister, Sister, memory becomes less a record of the past than an ongoing negotiation between what we remember, what we forget, and what we retell together.