Kristen Roles has recently been making fragile images, contingent objects, and renegotiative gestures in Albuquerque, where she completed her MFA from the University of New Mexico this May. She earned her BFA and BA in Psychology from the University of South Florida in 2014 and hurdled into grad school with little life experience outside of academia. She wants her work to hover along the edge of existence, but it exists concretely enough to have been exhibited recently at Graft, Small Engine, and 516 Arts in Albuquerque; David Richard and Form & Concept in Santa Fe; and featured by Der Greif, Oranbeg Press, Photo-Emphasis, Don’t Smile, Palm* Studios, and The Skinned Knee Collective. She will be in residence in London this autumn with the CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SUBSTRUCTURED LOSS for applied grief and bereavement research.

She hopes you’ll visit www.cargocollective.com/Jaroslawstudencki to keep alive the work of a brilliant artist/human with whom she shared too little time in this world.

Green Walls, Two Years

What’s Lost and Been Let In

But All I Ever Heard Was…

The Same Impossible

We call out into some elsewhere, hoping for reverberation.
Do overlapping echoes interrupt or make one another more whole?

What might it mean to collaborate with someone who is no longer living?
Does a photograph exposed by one person and developed by another belong to one or both?
What are the ontological, visual, moral, and emotional lines (or grey areas) between influence, collaboration, and appropriation?
What amount of translucence or opacity elevates without exploiting the work and memory of the
deceased in its translation and re-presentation at the hands of another?
Is preservation stronger in withholding, keeping close to the chest; or in sharing, dissemination, and living repertoire?
What spaces of awkwardness and sincerity can exist in the absorption or refusal of other people’s pain?
What points of reference might bridge the personal and the collective?
Can we, through visual and tactile articulation, approach mutable, mutual understandings of these conditions around which words seem to fail?

Through the images, words, and other vessels of The Same Impossible, I wish to dissolve thin boundaries and heavy breadths, at best spurring refrains of-
Have I seen that/ been there/ felt this before? while I continue to ask,
How much can I hold through remembering?
How much of You is sustained through what’s left?
How much can We know by looking?
Do overlapping echoes interrupt or make one another more whole?

Under a Speculative Fracture

Lightning, Dust

Everything I Swept off the Floor

Cat Tooth

Nowhere Better (After Félix González-Torres)

Lenses

Greyhound, 35mm Test Roll (Image made by Jaroslaw Studencki, Accidentally Developed by Me September 2016)

Oyster

In Mast and Hull

Jemez Springs (03.15/08.17)

Many Times Raked, Turned

Wells

What Was Key West? Poland? The Screenshot on My Desktop Labeled “Coincidences”?

And Was and Is

As If to Alert a Ship at Sea

Retention Pond, Medical Center of Trinity (11.14/12.15/06.16)

Of the Silt Dug out to Deepen

To view more of Kristen Roles’s work please visit her website.

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