Michelle Bablitz

Michelle Bablitz is an artist working predominately in the fields of photography and writing. Bablitz received her MFA degree in Imaging Arts & Sciences from Rochester Institute of Technology, and she has exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions across the United States. Her photographic work largely encompasses the motifs of memory, loss and self-actualization. Bablitz resides in Brooklyn, New York, where she actively writes, photographs, and runs the artist agency SAINT LUCY Represents.

Artist Statement: I could go with you.

The series I could go with you. is the fragmented narrative of an internal struggle following a traumatic event. The series’ narrator is unable to come to terms with memories that are overwhelmingly painful. While attempting to navigate daily life and regain a sense of normalcy, she is afflicted with repressions from the past emerging in her present-day world. The images obscure the possibilities of the narrator’s future with a permanent state of loss in her past, collapsing the confines of time and space. Her fragile retrospective sentiments, as well as the fractured chronology, are examined through glass etchings.

I could go with you. is an investigation into how text and image work together to communicate a story, while challenging the credibility of memory. In many ways a photograph is eternally fictional and unattainable; one can never look upon an image and revisit the same scene or moment that was tangible only for a fraction of a second to the image-maker. A photograph transports its viewer to a scene that can be infinitely reinterpreted, but never truly revisited. However, once text is written, or etched onto glass as it is in this series, it has factual and constant points of entry that conjure unique images and reference points to each reader/viewer. Text and image communicate a disjointed narrative that mirrors how memory and trauma function in the human psyche when combined in this series.