NYAB Event - Caroline Santa and Jen Schwarting “Conversation Space”

Caroline Santa and Jen Schwarting “Conversation Space”

TSA

This event has ended.

TSA presents Conversation Space, a two-person exhibition featuring recent work by Caroline Santa and Jen Schwarting, curated by Rachael Gorchov. Both Schwarting and Santa use major art movements of the 20th century as a vocabulary to catapult themselves into a space for the contemplation of studio work and womanhood. Schwarting insets digital images of “drunk girls” found on the Internet within paintings and columns that borrow from Bauhaus textile and furniture design. Santa, referencing a Post-Minimalist aesthetic of letting materials lay where they fall, employs a method of working that is spontaneous and intuitive to make her installations.

When she began teaching college, Jen Schwarting who is based in Brooklyn, noticed a contrast between her students and her own sense of individual freedom when she was their age. The presence of the Internet and digital photography in her students’ lives meant that they always could be documented publicly in a way that she did not experience; and as a result they seemed to lose a degree of personal agency. Through this realization, Schwarting embarked on her current project in which she pulls anonymous photos of young women in ambiguously vulnerable situations from a digital space and reframes them by placing them in handmade, human-scale spaces in order to invite examination and discussion of their experiences.

In her method of working Caroline Santa, based in Philadelphia, uses an incidental decision making process in the studio. She has an accumulative practice, foraging the negative space cut outs, ripped off remnants, and other edited portions of her own paintings and drawings as well as her students’, which congeal into her artwork. Her works have indefinite borders and depend on one another to be deciphered. Santa embraces limitations that her roles a teacher and mother place on her time and materials, and allows this to frame her decisions. Instead of continually amassing more and new material, Santa takes a practical and resourceful approach to her studio practice by using the time and tools she has to break down her work to form a new language.

Both of these artists take consumption and undervalued articles seriously. Caroline Santa consumes by products of the studio. Jen Schwarting focuses on how an image and its history are consumed. Both artists use image, motif and art object as language. For Schwarting, the loaded digital images and specifically modernist painted forms frame a conversation. For Santa, the comparison of surface to mark, mark to mark, surface to surface, and object to object becomes writing. They each use this language to contemplate and communicate lived experiences.