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Good Grief is an exhibition focusing on collage as a tool for navigating difficult emotions that follow the loss of a loved one. Within the last coupe of years, Henson and Brock have separately experienced the death of someone close to them. The various-sized collages, videos, and audio pieces in this exhibition were created to explore, heal from, process, and sometimes distract from that loss. Grief is not just one but a multitude of emotions - sadness, confusion, anger, disbelief, guilt, and so on. Because of this, there is a strange familiarity with grief and a complete lack of direction and understanding. 

The medium of collage seems uniquely qualified for confronting grief. It is as destructive as it is to productive. To create a work of collage, there must be a tearing or cutting away of what once existed in the world as something else. The violent, or at least abrupt act of taking away an image from its "rightful" place and re-contextualizing it allows for the potential externalization of the internal and hard-to-explain emotions. Grief is messy, never consistent, and always open-ended. So is collage. Good Grief offers an opportunity for reflection and participation in the process of ongoing healing and attempts to understand what feels most difficult to grasp. 

Rylee Henson is an artist and educator pursuing a Fine Arts PhD. at TTU. Her creative work focuses broadly on themes of memory, human motivation, morality, and immortality. Henson is interested in how individuals and communities confront (or avoid) death and dying in their everyday life.

Destanee Brock is a BFA student at TTU, studying Printmaking and Business. Their practice is primarily concerned with the creative process as catharsis. Brock uses various mediums to delve into themes of loss and longing in their work, often pulling directly from their personal experiences.