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CELEBRATING 150 YEARS OF CREATIVE EXCELLENCE 1873 — 2023

Katie Virag

I am fascinated by the state of being in-between; by the mental spaces that are somehow neither here nor there, but also somehow both here and there.

I began experiencing dissociation at a young age, going through bouts of depersonalization and derealization where it felt as though my mind was separate from my body and my surroundings, as if I were watching myself go through life in third person, distorting the threshold between reality and nonreality. This disconnection was simultaneously comforting and terrifying. Drifting in and out of this state created a fragmented view of reality and a fragmented sense of personal identity.

My work is concerned with the psychological antitheses of dissociation – comfort vs discomfort, safety vs danger, and reality vs non-reality, and the continuum of liminal space between these polarities. Through large-scale installations, I create a physical space for the viewer to enter. These spaces, like that of the mental state of dissociation, have an uncertainty about them. They are simultaneously comfortable and uncomfortable.

In a broader sense, these concepts are not limited to pathological dissociation, but also applicable to other experiences and transitions in life where one finds themselves at an uncertain threshold between two points, particularly adolescence.

My current body of work revolves around the idea of the coloring book image. These images are inherently transitory, suspended in a state of incompleteness. No matter how realistic the original line drawing or how carefully they are colored, they will never be “real”, maintaining a strong, cartoon-like quality.