Benediction | Charcoal, Watercolor, Collaged Etchings | 60" x 130" | 2006
Heliotrope | Charcoal, Gouache, and Powder Pigment | 70" x 40" | 2006
Artist Statement: My exploration is concerned with space, the intimacy of individual experience and the liminal aspects of memory. Buildings and cultural myths both are terrains that become saturated with people’s stories through use and circulation. Working in two-dimensions, I have developed my own hybrid of drawing/painting/printmaking, in which I intuitively re-work the paper until a space and story emerge. My installations reflect my life-long interest in the relationship between our internal physical sense of occupying bodies and our perceptions of occupying architectural space. I push the delicate material of tracing paper to its limit, relying on its folds to lend stability to forms. Over the course of an exhibit, the paper eventually gives way to gravity, and at the exhibit’s closing, the work is recycled.
Carrie Scanga is an installation artist and printmaker with an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle. Her magical realist images and her installations of folded paper have been exhibited in over 50 solo and group exhibitions and received critical recognition in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the art blog, Printeresting.org. Notable venues include: PLUG Projects (Kansas City, MO), Islip Art Museum (East Islip, NY), St. Louis Craft Alliance (St. Louis, MO), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Philadelphia, PA), El Conteiner (Quito, Ecuador), Janet Turner Print Museum (Chico, CA), and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (New Paltz, NY). Scanga has been awarded two consecutive fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a fellowship from The MacDowell Colony, and residencies at the Blue Mountain Center, Fundación Valparaíso, Sculpture Space, Artspace, and the Salina Art Center. Grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation have supported the development of her work. Carrie Scanga lives in Maine and teaches art at Bowdoin College. Her work is in numerous private and public collections, including the Free Library of Philadelphia and five public university collections.