Regan Henley
Artist Statement
I make work about grief, death and trauma.
This statement may sound daunting at first, but I find these are constants we are often oversaturated with and underprepared for. I make art for both cathartic and didactic purposes, as both a release for myself and the viewer, but also as prescriptive devices that may help us better understand those who are grieving, and our own losses.
My practice takes cues from early artistic traditions of Memento Mori. I am interested in art’s ever-present role throughout time to make sense of death, loss and our own mortality. I approach these enduring questions with new media; relying on contemporary digital aesthetics, internet culture and experimental digital media. My work pulls from many new and old art therapeutic techniques to provide spaces of grounding and catharsis, exploring ways in which we can use art to express ritual, and continue bonds with our loved ones in a world that exists increasingly in digital spaces.
As a maker, my work is increasingly focused on the tactility and physicality of cerebral concepts. Even my video, sound and digital works rely heavily on the evocative and grounding nature of physicality, even if only imagined. Likewise, dark humor, the uncanny, the grotesque, the paranormal and the divine all play a role creating the evocative experiences I hope to facilitate for viewers of my work.
I am a firm believer in the honoring and exploration of grief as an expression of human tenderness and enduring love; even with its sharp and painful edges. I make art not to combat mortality, nor obscure loss or suffering but confront it as proof of being. In the immortal words of psychologist Rollo May, “One does not become fully human painlessly.”
Bio
Regan Henley is an American multimedia artist from Phoenix, Arizona. She works in multiple art mediums including photo, video, interactive digital art, and sculpture. She has a Master of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University in New York and obtained her undergraduate degree in Intermedia Art at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.
She has exhibited her work all over the United States as well as internationally in Germany and Canada. Her work has been featured in Average Arts Magazine, Null Set Magazine, The Daily Orange, and The Family Reviews. She has presented her work at the Museum of Science and Technology in central New York, The Shemer Art Center in Arizona, and Ontario College of Art University in Toronto. She was a 2018 artist-in-residence for the international Feminist Art Collective on Toronto Island, and a 2019 artist-in-residence at the Ayatana Mortem program in Ottawa, a research residency for artists studying issues of death and dying.
In October of 2016 she debuted her first solo show C@tharsis, exploring the use of digital technologies as emotional aides in the mourning and grieving process. Her work investigates intersections of emotional intimacy and art as therapy in conjunction with new digital technologies and internet culture. Much of her current work centers around cultural perceptions of death and dying in the digital era, as well as evolving forms of grieving rituals perpetuated online and through new forms of media.
reganhenley.com
@reganhenley