Healing the Cultural Body

Clarissa Sligh creates artworks as a self therapy and cultural therapy, using history as a medium to create emotion and clarify truth. In her artworks, emotive qualities are held in higher esteem than painting technique. After careers as a computer programmer for NASA and a Wall Street financial analyst, Sligh turned to art full-time in the early 1980's (Marks 18). Many of her works focus on the complexity of racism in particular. Through photographic processes and expressive texts, along with other processes, Sligh's art develops the emotional landscape of specific experiences, revealing complex relational tensions and struggles. Is this real art? She is not a formal painter or a sculptor, but her creations do convey interesting and important realities that often remain unspoken or ignored.

In her disturbing but poignant four-part work Reframing the Past, an innocent child is the voice of the piece (Marks 18). Positive imagery is challenged and humanized against parodied texts of the grade school reader Fun With Dick and Jane. The piece reveals molestation between two children and dissolution of trust and family unity. Marks reveres Sligh for the undoing of the "violence" of positive imagery in her works (Marks 18). By confronting her own memories and fears, Sligh gives others the freedom to explore their own painful truths.

But what is wrong with positive imagery? All forms of art imitate life and reveal qualities of humanity in their own way. Is Sligh really healing the viewer or disturbing the viewer? Is she exploiting the viewer by using a child's voice to speak about abuse? Is the shock effect and blatant sexuality of the pieces what captivates the audience? Are we being enriched by the complex realities conveyed?

Marks, Laura U. "Healing the Cultural Body: Clarissa Sligh's Unfinished Business." Center Quarterly, 55 (1992): 18-22.