{"id":4698,"date":"2011-11-05T11:21:08","date_gmt":"2011-11-05T18:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=4698"},"modified":"2014-01-25T18:10:23","modified_gmt":"2014-01-25T23:10:23","slug":"channeling-anguish-into-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=4698","title":{"rendered":"Channeling anguish into art"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Kasey Tararuj, pictured at last year\u2019s TCNJ alumni artist showcase, next to the work she exhibited, "1EG3D."<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Just days before she was supposed to start high school, 14-year-old Kasey Tararuj \u201908<\/strong> awoke with a throbbing pain in her upper back. She tried to go about her morning, but an hour later her legs started to shake, then went numb. After being rushed to the hospital and enduring surgery to remove the AVM (arteriovenous malformation) that doctors had found on her spinal cord, Tararuj returned home two-and-a-half months later as a paraplegic.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I had is very rare in someone so young, and it\u2019s usually fatal,\u201d she says now, more than a decade later. \u201cI went back to school almost immediately\u2014I didn\u2019t want to miss out on anything\u2014but it was a huge change. I was depressed for years and years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tararuj turned to art as an escape. It had been her favorite subject since elementary school, but after the AVM surgery, she threw herself into it with even greater zeal. \u201cWhen I\u2019m making art, I forget about anything else that\u2019s going on in my life,\u201d she says. \u201cI lose myself when I start painting or drawing or sculpting. It\u2019s a good way to forget about all those daily challenges and annoyances.\u201d<\/p>\n

She also happens to have serious talent. Her work has been exhibited across the country in both solo and group shows, and her customized art toys\u2014more on those later\u2014have won multiple awards. \u201cShe\u2019s a fabulous artist,\u201d says an illustrator who goes by the name Chogrin and runs an artists\u2019 society of which Tararuj is a member. \u201cShe\u2019s unique and passionate, and she\u2019s definitely got her craftsmanship down. She\u2019s got her own voice, her own style, and for any show we put together, I\u2019m always excited to see what she\u2019ll come up with.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aside from moving her to create art in the first place, Tararuj says her disability is also a frequent theme in her drawings and paintings. For instance, a drawing titled upstairs<\/em> (2005) shows a faceless girl in a wheelchair sitting at the base of a daunting set of stairs, a broken handicapped-accessible sign hanging to her right. Spinal cords are also a recurring focus, as in weightless<\/em> (2006), where they form haunting white trees, or restriction<\/em> (2006), in which a woman\u2019s spine protrudes from her back and wends its way around her legs, binding them.<\/p>\n

Those particular themes are what Chogrin says made him immediately think \u201cmodern-day Frida Kahlo\u201d\u2014the artist who was seriously injured in a bus accident at age 18\u2014when he first saw Tararuj\u2019s work. \u201c[Like Kahlo,] Kasey paints what she feels,\u201d he says, \u201cand I think that\u2019s what makes someone a great artist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Describing her work as \u201cdark and surreal,\u201d Tararuj names Tim Burton and Salvador Dali among her biggest artistic influences. She also says she\u2019s been broadening her use of media and subject matter recently, creating pieces that \u201caren\u2019t as dark and disability-oriented.\u201d Among those lighter works are the award-winning custom Munny figures she has designed and hand-painted for toy company Kidrobot\u2019s annual competitions. She took home two awards for them this year\u2014one for a baby chimpanzee whose mouth is stuffed with unpeeled bananas and one for a giraffe ridden by a tiny rodent master\u2014and two in the 2010 competition.<\/p>\n

She says much of the inspiration for those petite creatures was drawn from her Kaotic Kritters series, which features cartoon-like paintings of dinosaurs, pets and people. \u201cI try to be as crazy and fun as possible with those and the Munnies,\u201d she says. \u201cI greatly amuse myself with them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking forward, Tararuj says she hopes to continue creating and showcasing her work for as long as possible. \u201cAs long as I don\u2019t stop, I\u2019ll be happy,\u201d she says. Chogrin has slightly bigger predictions: \u201cI\u2019m really looking forward to seeing where she is 10 years from now,\u201d he says. \u201cI think she\u2019s going to be really well-known\u2014truly an artist to be remembered.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kasey Tararuj’s disability is a frequent theme in her drawings and paintings, prompting some to call her a modern-day Frida Kahlo. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":4700,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni-corner","category-november-2011"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}