Alliance Francaise De Pasadena

Karen’s mixed media piece, September’s Tracks was selected for the group exhibition, DÉPAYSER, which featured 17 artists who interpreted the French word “Dépayser.”The French language consists of many words that cannot be translated neatly into English. “Dépayser” describes the fundamental experience of leaving your comfort zone: that which accompanies, for example, learning a new language or visiting a foreign country. Literally, the verb “dépayser” means to displace somebody, causing a change in scenery and routine, and by extension, disorientation and a feeling of strangeness. This upheaval is particularly manifest in art, as Marcel Proust explains in Time Regained: “Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.”