Pinky Bass: [Exhibition Title]
Troy University, Troy, Alabama
2026
Exhibition essay accompanying the work of artist Pinky Bass.
There’s a striking kinship between Pinky Bass’s art practice and Donna Haraway’s scholarship. They both explore the web of relationships between ourselves and the external forces, material, ancestral, environmental, and relational, that shape and define our existence.
As Haraway writes, “living and dead, we are at stake in each other’s company”, this idea is intrinsic to Bass’s practice. She recognizes that artmaking does not happen in a vacuum; she collaborates with those from her past as much as she does with those in her present. Her work emerges from these ongoing relationships, where memory, experience, and the traces of others remain active participants in her art making process.
We, humans, are also collectors. Collectors of objects, of stories, and of memories. Bass, an avid collector, but her act of collecting is not merely archival. She creates relationships between things that might otherwise remain unrelated. In her hands, collected objects and experiences become curios in their own right: transformed, recontextualized, and imbued with new meaning. Her work becomes a record of these encounters, a kind of receipt for experiences shared with others. She gives physical form to the ways memory and relationships persist, even as people, objects, and moments move beyond our immediate presence.