Katherine Toukhy

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

Katherine Toukhy’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses mixed media, installation, painting, public works, and video through participatory and solo processes. She embraces embodied knowing and research on the intersectional issues affecting herself/her communities to challenge ongoing narratives of displacement and erasure. A consistent thread throughout her practice has been combining improvised figurative representation with various materials. Engagements with materials such as collected writings, physical movement, forms from nature, and historical photos become strategies to work out the contradictions inherent in forging space and place in the present, as a Coptic Egyptian person born in the Northeastern U.S. (currently residing in Brooklyn, unceded Lenapekohing). Past artistic projects have included themes such as immigration, gender violence, and militarism. In her figurative cut-outs the pieces are embedded with stories of psychic and corporeal transformation, often with surreal elements to describe inner states. Severed female figures find new growth. A fragmented silhouette grows a porcupine-like spine down to her feet; arms become wings and she is falling or maybe flying; a decapitated figure blooms into one with a bushy tree-like head. Toukhy finds shapes by moving her own body or improvising with others then layering in plant forms/ texts/ patterns until she is satisfied with the energy breaking through these dis-membered re-membered forms. Earlier...

Artwork