Today we’d like to introduce you to Carol Prusa.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
As a child, I tried to make sense of the world. Why is there something instead of nothing? Contrary to my head-elder fundamentalist father, I found comfort in science. While titrating unknowns as a chemistry major, I met an artist who offered other ways of knowing resulting in a degree in medical art. Working as a medical illustrator, I quickly realized I didn’t want to make what other people wanted so I got an MFA in painting and drawing.
Determined to describe a world as beautiful as the Duomo (following a summer teaching in Florence, Italy), I scribed rigorously ordered grey worlds, creating an immense architecture for my spirit through tiny accumulated marks at the intimate scale of silverpoint. Known now for large-scale silverpoint works, my materials and methods evolved to express a balance between expansion and collapse, dark and light. Grey, with subtle variations in warm and cool hues, is employed for its liminal location. My worlds are initiated with hatched silverpoint lines marking time and place on the illuminated surface, then sublimated with graphite washes to allow new possibilities to emerge, resolved by heightening with white paint. I am driven to make what I need to see. To this day, the only time my mind is calm is when seeing a finished work. I spend most of my time in my own head and in my studio.
I moved to Florida after a two-part article in Art in America came out in 1999 saying South Florida was the next great place for art and joined Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Miami in 2001 and when she closed, Brintz Gallery in Palm Beach (now 375 Gallery).
Please tell us about your art.
I seek to give form to thin spaces that evoke the dark matter that both surrounds and binds us together.
As an umbraphile, I am creating darkened worlds with erotically charged geometries. These dimly lit, less rational worlds distill disquieting possibilities brought to mind by recent observations of the Higgs boson – the metastable “God” particle in physics that might instantaneously blip us out of existence (as well as eruptive events, both political and environmental), that fill my mind with dread. Instead of redemption, I yearn to realize a radical vision that takes into account chaotic interactions central to the formation and evolution of the universe, to unearth its vital beauty, plumbing the “threshole” of its dark belly (outside of local time and scale). Through my work, I speak to the overwhelming fecundity of life and the resilient connections creating our universe. While giving no answers, I express life as infinitely generous.
I traveled to experience the totality of the eclipse, August 21, 2017, following in the footsteps of American astronomer Maria Mitchel. Her story, combined with those of other astronomers such as Vera Rubin who provided early evidence of dark matter, are feeding a new bodywork I call “Curtains.” As Mitchell stated in her diary, “We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.” Currently I am researching the women computers of the Harvard Observatory, wonderfully detailed in The Glass Universe; How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel, to initiate a focused body of work for my solo exhibition called Dark Light at the Boca Raton Museum of Art ( August 20, 2019-January 19, 2020).
I create worlds sustained by logic internal to the work; a download-of-sort of what I feel like to be alive, at least at this moment, while consuming contested cosmologies. Merging pre-industrial craft methods of silverpoint and metal leafing, heightened with white paint, with contemporary strategies, surfaces are articulated to create liminal skins between known and unknown. These thresholds express my sense of euphoria when glimpsing the interconnectedness that surrounds and binds. I look to mathematicians and scientists for grand theories and poets for language to express the strangeness of what is possible.
Do you have any advice for other artists? Any lessons you wished you learned earlier?
Make what you need to see, develop the necessary skills and materials and methods to make it compelling. Work without caring for its place, meaning, don’t make work to fit some need outside of itself. I believe art needs to be free of conforming modes of making.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
I show my work at several galleries, nationally and internationally and exhibit widely in curated exhibitions and museums. The closest gallery in South Florida is 375 Gallery at 375 County Road in Palm Beach. I have work in a number of museum collections, locally the Ft. Lauderdale Museum of Art and the Perez Art Museum in Miami (although the work isn’t currently on display). I have a large work in the collection of the Museum of Arts and Design at Columbus Circle in NYC that is currently on display in MAD Collects (Sept. 2018-March 2019). Upcoming I have a solo exhibition at the Boca Raton Museum of Art that opens in August 2019 and will be up until January 2020.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.carolprusa.com
- Instagram: carolprusa
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