Artist Talk: Karen Ami

Chicago-based artist Karen Ami presents a series of interdisciplinary mosaic works in 'Well-Kept Ruins,' an exhibition addressing brokenness, chaos, and repair in the context of adoption and post-Holocaust generational trauma. These works incorporate inscribed and carved ceramic shards, sculpture, writing, drawing, and collage, an entanglement of her narrative, autoethnographic practice, and art research. This year, several of these selected works were created and exhibited during her PhD dissertation research in Berlin, Germany, the site of maternal and ancestral threads severed by the Holocaust. Ami's works examine feminist identity and familial repair, a re-connection to the remnants and apparitions that remain after loss and disruption. The exhibition's title is inspired by feminist theorist poet Hélène Cixous’s reflective memoir on returning to what remains of the past. The manifestation of these well-kept ruins is about refusing closure, rebuilding imaginary places around the fragments that remain restless yet still before us.