Naomi Shersty: The States Project: Wisconsin

Naomi Shersty: The States Project: Wisconsin by Kevin J. MiyazakiJanuary 9, 2016

©Naomi Shersty

The acts of looking back and looking within are perhaps best done from a distance. The images in Naomi Shersty‘s series Swaddle are clearly not from Wisconsin. That’s evident in the foliage, the landscape – the light – and reflect Shersty’s roots in the state of Florida. She delves into that past, a personal narrative that explores self, family and place, from her newer home in the Midwest. In a recent exhibition here, I was taken by the small and delicate way that Shersty puts the work into the world – not unlike, it might seem, the fragility that can accompany personal histories.

Naomi Shersty has been storytelling through words and pictures for as long as she can remember. Her projects take the form of books, zines, drawings, photographs, videos, installations and text based collages. Shersty’s multimedia artwork has been exhibited both both nationally and internationally at venues such as the New Mexico Museum of Art (Santa Fe, NM), Newspace Center for Photography (Portland, OR), The Center for Psychoanalytic Study (NY,NY) and Gallery 00130 (Helsinki, Finland). Her photographs have been featured in numerous publications including Frontiers: Journal of Women Studies (University of Nebraska Press), Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice (Routledge), and Learning to Love You More (Prestel Publishing). Shersty received her BFA from The University of Florida, and her MFA from The University of New Mexico. She lives and works in Milwaukee, WI.

Swaddle

Swaddle is an ongoing rumination and retelling of my relationship to the South.

In this series of images, as with all my artwork, I mine past experiences to reinterpret and reclaim those experiences. My work incorporates both fact and fiction to address topics such as the culture of place, the relationship between self and environment, and residual issues of power, control and desire.

This work questions what is nurtured, what is neglected, what is lost, and what remains.