Carrie Scanga
#6: Future

02.06.21 30.06.21

Carrie Scanga is a multi-disciplinary artist whose installations and works on paper reflect on personal mythologies, examine nostalgias for place and identity, and engage theories from ecology, architecture and design. She attended Bryn Mawr College as an undergraduate and earned an MFA in Printmaking from University of Washington. She has held solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, and her work has been included in group exhibitions in commercial galleries, artist-run spaces, and museums, including the Portland Museum of Art and the Kingston Museum of Contemporary Art. Carrie is an Associate Professor at Bowdoin College, where she also directs the Marvin Bileck Printmaking Project visiting artist program.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My multidisciplinary works explore spatial experiences and embodied narratives that serve as portals to incorporeal states of the human experience: loss, possibility, change. My curiosity about personal mythologies or cultural nostalgias for place and identity take visual form as images, relational works, installations, and sound art. I engage theories from ecology, architecture and design while also drawing on my own embodied experience and others’ stories of bodily sensation and spatial awareness. I want to imagine and share visuals of transformation and interconnected resilience with others. Ultimately, I believe that art has the capacity to tell the story of the spiritual life of human beings and can be a catalyst or tool for healing in a society. My practice is an attempt to contribute to this possibility.

ABOUT #FUTURE

Working together across space has been a fascinating parallel to the exploration of time’s many facets and meanings during Together Apart—#FUTURE. ´ace set up an appropriately elastic experience in which complex projects unfolded over just a few days or we took a full week to soak in a gesture. I have felt this to be an authentic way to work in this era of flux and possibility.

Some of the things I have valued most about this experience: the incredibly open and nurturing container ´ace established in a virtual setting, the stimulating lectures by Andres and Daniela, the chance to share experiments with peers and learn from the wonderful works of others, the diversity of the artists in terms of age, background, cultural experience, and artistic approach, my sense that the art world is now both a larger and smaller than before.

BIO
Carrie Scanga
1977 | Portland, Maine, USA
Lives and works in Portland, Maine, USA

EDUCATION
2001 | Master of Fine Arts, University of Washington, USA

EXHIBITIONS
2020 | Open Portfolio, FIG Bilbao, Spain
2020 | Sanctuary (solo exhibition), University of New England, USA
2019 | Making Air Visible (solo exhibition), Harvard University, USA
2018 | Circle Time, Able Baker Contemporary, USA
2017 | Feast on Paper Art, Paper Gallery Shanghai, China

AWARDS
Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant
New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship
Creative Capital Foundation Finalist
Sculpture Space Fellowship
The MacDowell Colony Fellowship

Related Activities

Encounters, Exhibitions

#6 | FUTURE: results
Artists in dialogue

14.07.21

“We must begin to educate ourselves, no longer in the critical exercise, but in the propositional abundance of ideas and worlds. That is the now of tomorrow ” CHUS MARTÍNEZ

#FUTURE (English cohort) was a new session of Together Apart through which we embarked into different considerations and proposals about and for the future. Taking as a framework artistic and conceptual references in relation to utopian and situated futures, the international cohort of artists worked individually and in collaboration, addressing the main theme through artistic practice, collective discussions and conceptual frameworks. This was a specially interesting cohort in regards to the articulation of disciplines and technologies. The working proposals were approached by creations that included printmaking to new media arts, textile arts and sustainable practices, including architecture and design. To mention only a few of the statements that the artists proposed, future was addressed as the negative space that implies how a form might move into it, future is the feeling of anticipation, future is the will to get back cancelled desires, future is transformation, future is restoration, future is expanding the present, future is a wheel spinning in its axis…

Transformation as a process to evoke the future was central in the work of many artists: transformation of materials (reuse, recycle, repetition, erasure), transformation of subjectivities (due to personal will or to external experiences) including gender transformation and approaches to transformations in our brain and body structures.

What other temporalities does the nature offer? Artists approached nature as the main master to explore life cycles, continuities of transformation and an endless source of wonder.

Nature and culture, considered in an imbricate dialogue and not as separate, allowed us to think in different timelines. Artists chose to work in collaboration with nature, from creating working materials from natural resources, as producing paper with plants, using poisonous leaves for an artistic gesture or exposing the artwork to outside atmospheric conditions for long periods of time.

The future of our artistic practices were also considered from proposals which would only unravel in the future or by creating a testament for the future distribution of artwork, even through taking care of the waste that art produces.

On July 14th we will make a public online presentation of all the collaborations which were initiated through this online programme and we will continue exploring through the practice such challenging and fundamental questions related to the future.

DANIELA RUIZ MORENO | Curator-in-Residence

Related artists

FUTURE VIRTUAL OPENING
July 14th, 2021
4PM GMT-3 | Argentina

Director
Alicia Candiani
General Coordinator
Andrés Knob
Curator-in-residence
Daniela Ruiz Moreno, connecting from Madrid, Spain
Guest Speaker
Joseph Scheer, connecting from Alfred, NY, USA
Assistant
Alen Iglesias