Artist Talk with Audrey Yang at ARC Gallery

Sanctuary As Method offers artmaking as refuge for “throwaway” materials—snack wrappers, used kitchen gloves, old bedsheets, dryer lint—and turbulent emotions—anger, disappointment, grief, fear. These are precious evidence and accumulation of every day that we are alive. Processing these over weeks, months, and years—through repeated acts of sewing, folding, painting, soaking, dyeing, shredding, reassembling—yields continuous transformation that cannot be defined or controlled long-term. Drawing inspiration from utopia as method in literature, this body of work traces the shift from suppressing to anticipating potential beyond language and knowing—then seeing that very potential within ourselves. Artmaking as a sanctuary for distress and debris anticipates how we come to peace with our own totality.

Audrey Yang is a Chinese-American interdisciplinary artist and educator, born and raised in Buffalo Grove, Illinois. She is currently pursuing a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Art Education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is grounded in relationships devoted to learning. She adheres to the belief that self-acceptance—the unlearning of shame—generates reciprocal webs of curiosity between oneself and others. Curiosity enables learners to think, work, interact, and imagine beyond disciplinary boundaries, beyond secondhand language, towards something infinite.