Stephanie Calvert “Shame to Pride”

Rabbit Hole Studio Gallery

poster for Stephanie Calvert “Shame to Pride”
[Image: Stephanie Calvert "Drifting, Daydreaming" (2015) Triptych with hand-dyed paper, wood, silicon, and paint, approx. 40 x72 in.]

This event has ended.

After a decade of avoiding her past, artist Stephanie Calvert is using art to process her challenging family history.

Her latest exhibition, Shame to Pride (opens November 12th in Dumbo), transforms her painful childhood memories into gorgeous 2-D and 3-D multimedia artworks.

Calvert is formally trained as an oil painter with a focus on rare Earth minerals, but this latest exhibition was a departure for her into deeply personal subject matter. It required her to revisit her chaotic childhood home: the very place that she had been trying to escape and forget.

At age 11, Calvert’s family moved to an abandoned schoolhouse in Thatcher, Colorado. For 6 years they lived without plumbing, central heat, or full electricity. In the isolation of the prairie, her parents hoarding tendencies grew exponentially.

Even after she left to get her art degree on the East Coast, Calvert still hid from her past, deeply ashamed of her family history and trying to put her childhood behind her. Her parents eventually moved out of the schoolhouse to live in a nearby town, but it wasn’t until her mother was in a bicycle accident and suffered severe brain damage that Calvert had the courage to come back to Colorado. During that return to her roots, she realized she still had a lot of unresolved questions about her experience at the Thatcher.

In the summer of 2014, Calvert decided to live and work in the schoolhouse again and create art from all the things her parents had hoarded over the years. She viewed it as a way to heal and transform her shame into self-acceptance. Working there without cell phone or internet access, Calvert turned the debris of her past into stunning multimedia tributes, from collage and paintings to three-dimensional installations. “I was overdue to explore this part of my life, and I realized making art from the objects there would be a powerful transformational rite,” she says. “I was also excited by the idea of living in the schoolhouse and using the space as my parents intended—as an artist’s retreat.”

The message in Shame to Pride is one of self-acceptance: what makes us unique is what makes us truly beautiful. She hopes that this work inspires others to embrace all parts of themselves and share their stories in a cathartic way.

Media

Schedule

from November 12, 2015 to November 15, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-11-12 from 18:30 to 23:00

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