Study 181: A Replica of a Witness: Selva Aparicio's Childhood Memories

Selva Aparicio's Childhood Memories renders a Persian carpet as a carving in discarded red oak flooring, ten by fifteen feet, cut by mallet and chisel. The artist describes the rug it replicates as one that quietly participated in years of familial abuse, and the work as being about covering up violence and exposing trauma. This study examines the object logic rather than the disclosure: a soft, movable thing that exists to cover has been rendered as a hard, fixed thing that exposes, and the covering has become the surface it was meant to hide. It also records a fact the coverage has largely n