Life’s oscillation
Life's Oscillation — Jaclyn Cohen ‘22
For much of my life, I have felt the need to create art as perfectly as possible, erasing and re-erasing and getting rid of any flaws from my subjects. But life isn't like this—it is rough, it takes unforeseeable turns, and it's imperfect—but I think that's what makes it beautiful. With this piece, I drew nine of my favorite moments and textures, each drawing taking between half an hour and two hours, and then ripped them up to create this sculpture: an oscillation of my life and memories. It pained me to tear these moments, but like life, memory is flawed; it is pieced together by neural networks and rearranged haphazardly. To be human, then, is to embrace the roughness—the amalgamation of what is real and what is altered through a fluctuation of 2D and 3D space.