2022 Student Award Submissions
Carley Schmidt
Artist Statement
Engaging the language of geometric abstraction and the strategy of repetition, my work reflects mapped space to speak to a larger narrative of human impact and intervention. I draw connections between factual records and the restrictions of recall, employing printmaking, papermaking, photography, and sculpture to present a poetic meditation on the changing landscape.
The unusual geometries within the works are derived from satellite photographs, and reference boundary lines found within the prairie region. Unlike the sky, untouched and unending, the land below the horizon takes on the human-drawn partitions brought by colonial development practices: manifested as fences, property lines, and other symbols of ownership.
I utilize these shapes to create intentional limitations, bounding an image’s expanse to the edges of its irregular form, or one color field to the edge of another.
These compositions form windows or reflections through which we can view our relationship with the natural and built world, and a paradox that illuminates a fraught yet optimistic relationship between people and the lands we occupy.
Email: cschmidt34@wisc.edu
Website: carleyschmidtart.com
Engaging the language of geometric abstraction and the strategy of repetition, my work reflects mapped space to speak to a larger narrative of human impact and intervention. I draw connections between factual records and the restrictions of recall, employing printmaking, papermaking, photography, and sculpture to present a poetic meditation on the changing landscape.
The unusual geometries within the works are derived from satellite photographs, and reference boundary lines found within the prairie region. Unlike the sky, untouched and unending, the land below the horizon takes on the human-drawn partitions brought by colonial development practices: manifested as fences, property lines, and other symbols of ownership.
I utilize these shapes to create intentional limitations, bounding an image’s expanse to the edges of its irregular form, or one color field to the edge of another.
These compositions form windows or reflections through which we can view our relationship with the natural and built world, and a paradox that illuminates a fraught yet optimistic relationship between people and the lands we occupy.
Email: cschmidt34@wisc.edu
Website: carleyschmidtart.com