On Friday, December 2 at Listen Hear, 21 year old Herron School of Art and Design student Jessica Kartawich displayed her original piece Dear Somebody, an audio piece that revolves around the motif of loss. Kartawich’s art includes a recording of someone telling their story of loss in each corner of the room. When standing in the middle of the room, the sorrow of each story overlaps and intermingles. However, if the listener interacts with the piece and walks to each corner of the room they can hear each story of loss individually. Kartawich recommended doing this first and then sitting in the center of the room and listening to the stories all at once.

Dear Somebody provided an outlet for those who have experienced loss to find solace with and connect to others by accepting rolling submissions of writing or audio from viewers’ personal experiences of grief, reflecting the ever changing emotions which surround the different losses human beings suffer. This documentation of “emotional residue” provides a layer of subtle solidarity to the participatory work.

“I feel like my art lately has been kind of introspective. Whether that’s labels people put on me, how I think of myself and my own identity, or something that has happened in my life that I feel like has had an effect on me, my strongest work comes from a personal place. As far as what I do when I create art, I don’t know how to answer that one. I just try and figure out how I feel about the subject and how I want other people to feel about it and how I can achieve that.” – Jessica Kartawich (Herron Photography Club)

See more from this event here.