Adrianna Watson is a multifaceted visual and performance artist based in Chicago, IL who uses a wide array of artistic mediums and materials to interrogate discomfort and the boundaries between artist, audience, and trust. Watson views each of her works as a form of self-portraiture, where she unpacks her existence in a chronically ill body that navigates an unsafe and unaccommodating world. Watson obscures and distorts objects, her corporeal form, and her body’s image to break down ideas of the seemingly immutable.
Watson’s work operates in the spaces between: between comfort and discomfort, the recognizable and the unfamiliar, safety and danger, existence and death. Creation has always been how she came to understand herself and the world around her, a way to grapple with morbid curiosities and to metabolize difficult subject matter. As she’s grown through life and found herself in an ever-changing body, one rattled by the effects of a worldwide pandemic, she has had to confront the notion that the world moves forward at a relentless pace, devouring those who cannot keep up.
The between acts as an interruption—a breath—that allows her a space to explore complex feelings in safety, without threat of judgement or the potential for external violence. The between also serves as a generative space that dissects normative understandings of self and environment. Through a variety of mediums and frameworks that foster fragmentation, Watson’s art dwells in the space between as a way of distorting and deconstructing the internal workings that predicate her existence.
