Exhibition - Karen Mahaffy: A Particular Quality of Loss

About the Event

A Particular Quality of Loss in the Fine Arts Club New Media Gallery envelopes the viewer in a magical room from an unknown era. Through memory, a misty mirror of time, Karen Mahaffy reconstructs her childhood bedroom’s flowered wallpaper as a digital animation. A haunting sepia-colored fog drifts over the entire image, as surprising moments of digital erosion occur. The viewer waits expectantly for a flower to pixilate and drop, wondering where the next will fall and then reconstitute itself. The silent waiting is actively meditative and rewarded by hypnotic transformations.

As a multi-disciplinary artist, Mahaffy pursues ideas of time, accumulation, loss, and the aura of our once-familiar belongings and environments. Asking where it is that our memories live, in A Particular Quality of Loss, the artist embeds them in digital form. By reimagining something remembered but lost, and using the cinematic element of time to illustrate age and erosion, Mahaffy evokes the fragility and brevity of life.

Karen Mahaffy (Elmhurst, Illinois, 1970 - ), Still from A Particular Quality of Loss, 2016/2024, multi-channel digital animation, 4 minutes 18 seconds, © Karen Mahaffy. Courtesy of the artist.

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