Constructed Discontent: MFA Thesis Exhibition by Celena Amburgey

Exhibition: April 8-12, 2025
Reception: Friday, April 11th, 6-8p

Constructed Discontent explores the fragile yet forceful process of self-definition, interrogating the tension between inherited narratives and those we create for ourselves. Through layered materials, fragmented imagery, and reassembled histories, this body of work challenges the structures that shape personal and cultural identity, questioning the forces that confine, shape, and ultimately reshape our sense of self.

At the core of this exhibition is an exploration of disruption and reconstruction—both emotionally and materially. Found objects, repurposed textiles, and unconventional surfaces serve as stand-ins for history and memory, revealing how identity is constantly built, unmade, and remade. The work reflects on familial myths, cultural expectations, and the weight of external perceptions, exposing the internal struggle between belonging and individuality.

Amburgey’s process is deeply tied to time and labor—sewing, layering, embedding, and obscuring. This physical engagement mirrors the psychological work of undoing past narratives and constructing new understandings. Materials such as plastic bags, burlap, and personal artifacts underscore the tension between value and disposability, reflecting the artist’s ongoing interrogation of what is cherished and what is discarded—in material form and in personal history.

By confronting discontent as a catalyst for transformation, Constructed Discontent explores how discomfort can become a space for healing. Rather than seeking resolution, these works engage in the slow, layered process of re-examining, reconstructing, and reclaiming identity. Through these acts of making and unmaking, the exhibition offers a space where the past is not erased but actively reworked—suggesting that, like identity,—healing is a process of persistence, choice, and re-visioning

More About Celena

Through painting, collage, and layered materials, I explore identity’s fragile and fluid nature, a journey ignited by the seismic revelation of a DNA test in 2021. This discovery fractured the foundations of my carefully constructed self, shattering it into fragments. Art became my means of reassembly, transforming personal reckoning into a universal meditation on resilience and reinvention. Each work reflects the process of claiming agency over inherited narratives—truths and deceptions—to construct a more intentional identity shaped by acceptance, understanding, and choice.

At the heart of my practice is the act of layering, where paint, collage, and family photographic archives converge to reconstruct identity. I use paint as collage, merging fragments of memory with the past and present to reshape my understanding of self. Once static relics, these inherited photographs become dynamic surfaces where paint and collage obscure, alter, and reveal, collapsing time and reshaping personal history. While rooted in personal experience, this process extends beyond self-exploration, questioning how identity is shaped by familial memory, collective history, and materiality. The layering of images and textures mimics how identity is formed—through accumulation, erasure, and reinterpretation. Like identity, objects are never static; they carry the weight of time, labor, and memory, continuously reshaped by use and perception.

Materials like pennies, burlap, and bed sheets carry layered histories, their transformations mirroring the shifting nature of value and belonging. Tarnished pennies, once insignificant and easily overlooked, become markers of perseverance and worth, reflecting how meaning is shaped by perception and context. With its rugged texture and utilitarian past, burlap speaks to resilience—stitched, stretched, and painted upon, it becomes a foundation for deconstruction and renewal. Once bearing the weight of familiarity and comfort, bed sheets are repurposed as vessels for new narratives, their fibers holding the echoes of past lives while offering space for reinvention. By repurposing these materials, I explore how objects, like identities, are never static but continuously reshaped by time, labor, and memory.

My work is a quiet rebellion, where past and present collide, discarded things breathe again, and vulnerability holds weight like stone. Here, identity is not fixed but fluid, not given but claimed, not lost but waiting to be seen. Even the fragments—the forgotten, the fractured, the worn—hold infinite possibilities, if we dare to see anew.