Artist Statement
Fluidity is an important quality in my multimodal practice. It is the quality I value most in movement, and it is how I like to shift between dance, art, and language, seizing on whatever tools will best embody a given idea. Through this multidisciplinary practice, I try to integrate parts of myself and explore a range of interests and longstanding concerns: death and separation anxiety, familial and cultural inheritance, the body as both signifier and obfuscator of personal identity, and the relationship between bodies and environments. Much of my dance on film and painted work also incorporates the landscape of my hometown of Walla Walla, Washington.
Through painting, primarily with oil, ink, and gouache, I attempt to evoke moods of nostalgia, loneliness, and existential alienation, as well as atmospheres that feel mysterious or vaguely unsettling.
Bio
Rachel Wyman is a multidisciplinary artist from Walla Walla, Washington, currently living between Walla Walla and Brooklyn, New York. She is a licensed Creative Arts Therapist in New York State. She received a BA in Dance and Africana Studies from Oberlin College, and an MS in Dance/Movement Therapy from Pratt Institute.
Rachel is a self-taught visual artist with over 17 years of dance training and performance. Her practice moves between movement, two and three dimensional art, writing, and film, sometimes incorporating multiple modalities. She has trained in a range of movement vocabularies, focusing primarily on dance forms of the African Diaspora and Simonson technique. As part of a three-month apprenticeship, she studied folkloric Malian dance with Bintu Keita of Les Ballets Maliens in Bamako, Mali in 2008, and returned to continue these studies in 2010 and 2011. She performed traditional Ivorian dance from 2012-2015 with Vado Diomande’s Kotchegna Dance Company in New York City. In collaboration with multimedia artist Derrick Adams, she performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in Adams’ The Channel in 2012. She has featured in music videos for artists Jeremiah Meece and Bero Bero, and in 2018 co-starred alongside Ikechukwu Ufomadu in Yanvalou, an award-winning short film by Angeline Gragasin.
Rachel’s written work has appeared in Emrys Journal, 21st Century Ghost Stories, and The Raven’s Perch. She received the Scythe Prize for Nonfiction in 2017 for “Body Snatching/a love story,” and the Summer 2015 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award for “Guede.” Her Blue Pajama series of paintings (2020-2021), was published in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine (2022) and Alien Literary Magazine (2021), and was inspired by her time working as a Creative Arts Therapist in a public hospital psychiatric department.