An Art of Loss

Abstract

This essay opens with a reading of a number of recent autobiographical exhibitions and books by illustrator, artist, and writer Maira Kalman. Oksman argues that a close reading of Kalman’s trans-medial, repetitive, and elliptical modes of telling her family’s history between and across various projects and texts, and using images and words, often in sequence, makes room for better understanding representations of loss in comics. Introducing two formal strategies apparent from Kalman’s works, ‘cumulatio’ and ‘combination,’ Oksman reads two contemporary autobiographical comics of loss that utilize such techniques. In Ulli Lust’s Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life (2013) and Una’s Becoming Unbecoming (2016), formal strategies of ‘cumulation’ and ‘combination’ help establish how individual losses are set in a dynamic, relational network.