Passage by artist Mazikeen Vizechy. Black and white abstract collagraph print. It is inside of a silver and white frame. Passage was a Juried Student Art Exhibition Purchase Award through the Catherine Haynes Memorial Quasi-Endowed Fund. Artist Statement: As a young artist, I know my craft and ideas will and should constantly evolve. For this moment, I have a path of the topics and goals I would like to pursue as an artist. The uncomfortable truth is, that I don't have a solitary contemporary artist that serves as an example for my goals. There are many artists I look to for inspiration that deal with the issues I am interested in and whose styles I admire such as Kathe Kollwitz, Kara Walker, and Juni Ito. I aim to produce emotionally charged images that explore how narratives affect the way we construct our own sense of identity and our understanding of reality. I have always been very connected to stories. I have come to realize they are at the very center of our being. We are constantly exposed to narratives. We have old family stories that form the foundations of our relationships. We have news stories that tell us how to interpret current events and the greater world. We have sagas of fantasy epics that allow us to escape from our own realities. Everything around us creates some sort of story to take in. In stories, we do not necessarily experience objective reality. We each experience some sort of amalgamation of the sensory information we art taking in and the experiences we have had in our past. Although we might not think about it very much, the things we choose to, or are forced to consume, have a huge impact on our realities. I especially find that things that repeat often and things from my childhood dominate my mind the most. At a base level, stories are very formulaic. Nearly every story is based on a traditional story, whether it follows it closely, innovates upon it, or completely subverts it. I am very interested in exploring the contemporary retellings of our stories connected to identity and reality.