Back to ExhibitionsA Particular Quality of Loss in the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts’ New Media Gallery envelopes the viewer in a magical room from an unknown era. Through memory, a misty mirror of time, Karen Mahaffy reconstructs her childhood bedroom’s flowered wallpaper as a digital animation. A haunting sepia-colored fog drifts over the entire image, as surprising moments of digital erosion occur. The viewer waits expectantly for a flower to pixilate and drop, wondering where the next will fall and then reconstitute itself. The silent waiting is actively meditative and rewarded by hypnotic transformations.
As a multi-disciplinary artist, Mahaffy pursues ideas of time, accumulation, loss, and the aura of our once-familiar belongings and environments. Asking where it is that our memories live, in A Particular Quality of Loss, the artist embeds them in digital form. By reimagining something remembered but lost, and using the cinematic element of time to illustrate age and erosion, Mahaffy evokes the fragility and brevity of life.
Karen Mahaffy (Elmhurst, Illinois, 1970 - ), Still from A Particular Quality of Loss, 2016/2024, multi-channel digital animation, 4 minutes 18 seconds, © Karen Mahaffy. Courtesy of the artist.
About Karen Mahaffy
Karen Mahaffy is a visual artist based in San Antonio, Texas. Working across a wide variety of media including sculpture, installation, video and digital media, Mahaffy explores the seemingly insignificant elements between familiar objects, moments and places and the accumulated experiences of everyday life.
She earned her MFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio, and has since exhibited nationally in galleries and museums including Artpace Foundation for Contemporary Art, the San Antonio Museum of Art, Sala Diaz, Blue Star Contemporary, and the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio; the McKinney Avenue Contemporary and the Center for Contemporary Art in Dallas; Locust Street Projects in Miami; SmackMellon and The Center for Media Studies in New York; and internationally at the Instituto Cultural de León in Guanajuato, Mexico, and Kunsthalle HGN, in Duderstadt, Germany.
Mahaffy is the recipient of the Dozier Travel Grant from the Dallas Museum of Art, a Fulbright-Hays Travel to China, and a Fulbright Scholars Grant to Estonia. She was the Artist Foundation of San Antonio Media Arts Grant awardee and artist-in-residence at Bei Gao Studios/ Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, the Estonian Artists’ Association in Tallinn, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (as part of the Blue Star Contemporary Berlin Residency Program), and most recently the inaugural summer artist-in-residence at Trinity University Department of Art & Art History in San Antonio, Texas.
She is currently Professor of Fine Arts at Palo Alto College in San Antonio, Texas.