If you went to the Performing Arts Center at Adelphi University, you would see the Senior Art Exhibit, which opened last week. There are plenty of pieces there that will catch your eye, but one piece may make you question its purpose more than the others.
Leah Nicolich’s Internal Struggles features several paintings of hands grasping at flesh, "trying to pointlessly change the skin," as well as piles of small, sculpted hands contorted into uncomfortable positions.
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Nicolich states that, "in these works, each hand is contorted in its own position to represent a different moment of trouble, with the intent to demonstrate how quickly that pile can become suffocating."
As someone who has generalized anxiety disorder herself, Nicolich understands how it can feel to have her battles go unnoticed. As her sculpture represents, one moment of struggle may be manageable, but the more they pile up, the more difficult it becomes to deal with them.
More often than not, these struggles are unseen, which can be frustrating and exhausting. In fact, the idea for this project had not come to Nicolich until she saw Heidi Schwegler's piece, Wrest. This piece involved Schwegler wrestling with another person, and then editing that person out, so that it appears that she is pointlessly fighting against nothing.
So why choose to focus on hands after being inspired by a full-body endeavor? According to Nicolich, it's because "hands are easily associate with humans but are still vague enough to represent an idea; therefore they make a great representation for humans when trying to express emotions. In a psychological way, they give away a lot of what a person is feeling in how they are positioned."
Therefore, Nicolich took utmost care to fully capture the strain in each hand she sculpted, right down to the bones and veins that pop out when the hand is tense.
Nicolich hopes that people who have their own internal struggles can take comfort in seeing them represented externally. "Internal struggles are difficult to deal with because it's not a wound.
No one can see it and a lot of the time you feel silly having these issues, as if you can control them if you just try hard enough... so when something abstract and internal has a concrete name or representation, you find relief in that. It's there and now you have proof that it's not all in your head."
Nicolich's work has earned her the A Conger Goodyear Award from the university's art department, not only for her "Internal Struggles," but for her commitment to the department in general. If you would like to take a look at her work, you can find it on display on the second floor of the Performing Arts Center at Adelphi University.
All images within this article taken by Samantha Wilson
