Manifest: Stephanie Wright
Guest Artist-in-Residence and exhibition
August 6 – September 25, 2021
Opening reception First Friday August 8, 6-8pm
Also First Friday September 3
Constellation Studios is pleased to host Stephanie Wright, as a Guest Artist-in-Residence, a new program to foster local artists for special projects. Her current body of work focusing on large scale drypoint prints on paper, will open on August 6 for First Friday, expand with new work throughout her residency and end September 25th with the installation and imagery transformed. Stephanie’s prints use animal imagery to activate a narrative of interrelationships and emotions of love, nurturing, rage, jealousy, social anxiety, fear and contemplation.
Stephanie has an uncanny drawing ability to capture such instinctual moods, through a turn of the head, glance of an eye, a furrow or eyelid lift, that wordlessly conveys such a range of emotions. She builds tensions through groupings, using space and placement to create isolation or movement. She scratches on plastic sheets with an etching needle to make a roughly textured image, which catches the printer’s ink when the plate surface is wiped. The plastic plate is run through the etching press with damped paper to impress the inky image into paper. In this way she can work directly and on a large scale, creating the enormity of an emotional body manifesting in flesh, hair, fur and faces, twisted in response to its own sentience.
Stephanie Wright earned her MFA at the University of Nebraska with a focus in Printmaking in the spring of 2017. She grew up in Louisiana and earned her BFA at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2014. She is an instructor and gallery manager at Live Yes Studios, Lincoln.
The artist states: “Even the animal subjects of my images are in performance for a human audience. Bare impressions on paper are a seemingly essential method of human-to-human communication– particularly when speaking through images of our animal peers to describe some aspect of ourselves, our society, where we fit in nature. The only truth that seems to reveal itself through our depiction of “the animal” is our self-awareness. A conceptualized and calculated portrayal of the “other” more so reflects and informs one’s portrayal of the self. Our symbolic descriptions of the world become a one-sided conversation- a mirror of one’s condition, and a possible beacon to our peers or “the other.” In the search for definition in our surroundings, through the drawing of the “creature,” we give off an unknowing longing, a signal of desire for communion, comfort, solace. An unspoken, less-humored feeling that we must have been lacking for some time in an understanding that is essential to our being but no longer disclosed to us. We cannot be as easily informed about ourselves. The human condition is in no way objective. In my active visual exploration I–like most humans– am in a constant process of learning, realizing and developing myself through the practice of invoking that communion between myself and my most personally perceived portrayal of the “other.”