EFF-Austin is hosting an outing to take in Co-Lab Project’s latest artistic installation, textscape, by Susan Scafati and Sean Ripple, on Thursday, February 23rd, from 7:00pm-9:00pm. We will have the gallery space to ourselves with libations, and the artists will be in attendance to answer questions about their work.
“textscape” is a meditation on constructed worlds, communication and connection through the gesture of text messaging. Combining old and new photographic processes, Scafati creates a multitude of iterations of the ubiquitous smartphone textbox, extensively layering and enlarging its form from its familiar handheld 1-2 inch size to up to 7-feet. This play on scale shifts its physical relationship to the human form and suggests a metaphor for a greater psychological impact on human experience.
Scafati’s artwork takes the form of large-scale archival pigment scrolls comprised of multi-layered cyanotypes and photograms, site-specific acrylic installations, a high-grade mesh banner, jumpsuits, and photocopies. As part of this project, Scafati commissioned the artist Sean Ripple to create his own original interactive, performance-based works that engage some of the exhibition objects — activating their life beyond the gallery space and further drawing metaphors about public and private, presence and absence, and real and virtual.
Contact Sean Ripple at 512-699-8168 to discuss his artworks for the exhibition.
Susan Scafati is an American contemporary artist whose abstract, conceptual artwork of the past decade has been focused on the ways in which individual versus collective identities, personal versus cultural mythologies, are constructed. Subjects that have provided a framework for these interests include personal archives, domestic spaces, bullfights, nuns, robot competitions, football, fishermen, and ant colonies. Across these bodies of work, she contemplates the iconography and materiality that contribute to the way meaning is organized and its impact on human experience. She has created her artwork abroad in Italy, France, China, Japan, and Australia, as well as in the United States.
Sean Ripple is a content provider, exhibitor, and curator based in Austin, TX. He has exhibited in Austin almost exclusively since 2003 and relies heavily on social media and the Internet to create intuitive, highly impulsive, and discursive works which are modest in scale. Ripple seeks to merely suggest what it is that he wants to convey to an audience, similar to how an impressionist might represent a cathedral as a ghostly figment of their own perception. The texts he uses to help identify the conceptual underpinnings of his artworks are often densely awkward and burdensome. He believes his approach to be one in which a deep sense of confusion in an age of rapid, technologically-induced destabilization across all sectors and aspects of culture is given a dedicated voice.
This project is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.
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