Khream Artist Statement

I am Khream, the artist formerly known as Laura Marie Panozzo.

Khream is not a confession. She is not a wound on display. Khream is strong and seen. Reborn in her  reinvention of midlife journey and celebration of survival in a cruel world. 

There is no single sentence that can hold her—no clean origin story—because I am a survivor of sexual assault and domestic violence,  the timeline of my becoming does not move in straight lines. 

It folds. It fractures. It remembers.

For much of my life, I was taught—quietly, persistently—that I was unloveable and not intelligent because of my severe dyslexia. 

 That my body was wrong for being smart and speaking out. My body was made for  many things however, from miracles to  traumatic abuse and back to survival again. 

That my reflection was something to recoil from. 

I carried that distortion like a veil, a mask. 

Khream  is what happens when that skin is shed.

My multi-dimensional self-—not only of the body, but of the soul, the heart, the interior of being truly ME.

 A survivor of a woman, with dangerous curves on a God given frame.  Expansive, unapologetic—holding both memory and transformation. 

Visions of vessels form in my heart like prayers, illuminated from within. 

My own Light as testimony.

 In radical acceptance. 

My writings, sculptures,  paintings, performance, say:

I am here, I am healing, I am whole, and I receive myself, my story, my survival song. 

I offer Invitations to hold my hand and sing along.