About the artist
Bekah Sullivan was born and raised in San Diego, California. As a graduate of San Diego State University with a B.A. in painting and printmaking and a minor in art history, she was the recipient of the Outstanding Graduate of the School of Art and Design Award at SDSU as well as the Art Council Ambassadors Award (2021). After her undergraduate work, she studied under Bill Kelly and Michele Burgess at Brighton Press in San Diego, where she developed her skills and art practice within the realm of book arts, printmaking and more broadly, mark making. She has taken her experience and love of book arts to the University of Nevada, Reno’s Black Rock Press where she currently works while pursuing an MFA in Art.
Artist's statement
I’m a drawing-based artist interested in the distorted recall of memory and expressing universal experiences such as vulnerability, discomfort, violence and solitude. The mutability, alteration, and shifting of memory and experience is innately tethered to the passage of time and for me translates into a longing for something I can never fully know again. In my work I reflect this reality by conveying realism and accuracy while imbedding subtle or more obvious disturbances throughout - be it the way I alter the placement of shadows or how I distill the environments to a black and grey palette. When I use a ballpoint pen, a non-archival medium, I am articulating this gradual obscured remembrance. As time passes, the fragility and impermanence of the pen marks become progressively more noticeable and less resistant. This medium becomes an embodiment of the transmutation of memory, emotion, and myself as I move through this life.
