T.J. Wilcox is a New York-based conceptual artist, whose work explores notions of memory and the self. Drawing from personal past, historical anecdote, fiction, history, film, pop culture, and myth, Wilcox's work is characterized by a fascination with how history is always under construction. His practice is tied closely to the medium of film and video that depict collages of historical narratives, juxtaposed against historical facts, fiction, myth, and fantasy. Working on the intersection of media-specificity and hybrid media techniques, Wilcox's narratives, constructed through a complex combination of analog and digital techniques of montage, collapse existing distinctions between objectivity/subjectivity, biography/autobiography, challenging thus existing notions and treatment of history and temporality.

Tragedy (Sissi at the sala Terrena), 2007 is a wall-size collage based on a still from Wilcox's three-part film entitled "Sissi, Princess of Bavaria". Wilcox draws on Sissi's unhappy marriage at the age of nineteen to her cousin Franz Joseph, whom she grew to despise. After having her four children kept from her and raised by their grandmother, she became increasingly erratic and obsessive. In 1898 poor Sissi's unhappy life came to an end when she was assassinated by an anarchist while walking by Lake Geneva. Wilcox positions the story around her love of horses and mixes footage of Lipizzaners shot in Texas with appropriated cuts from her life's cult narrative. The collage incorporates a mixture of found footage and original film footage and is a continuation of the artist's modernist investigation into narrative film genres.