Stephanie Pierce will continue the 2024 Chautauqua Visual Arts Lecture Series at 6 p.m. tonight in Hultquist Center.
Her lecture follows fellow faculty members Susan Lichtman, Sachiko Akiyama, Alex Callender and Kevin Umaña, in addition to visiting artist Anina Major.
Pierce, an oil painter, will discuss her progression as a painter since she began her formal studies in 1992. After finishing her undergraduate studies at The Art Institute of Boston, she attended University of Washington, where she received an MFA in painting and drawing.
Pierce said she will talk about the evolution of her work throughout her career as an artist. She said she intends to showcase the trajectory of her work and the ideas, sources and processes behind her journey as an artist and maker.
She said that her artistic process focuses on observation and truly engaging with her surroundings.
“My process is rooted in observation and looking and really is about perception and how things change over time,” she said.
In her artistic statement, Pierce wrote that her paintings in particular explore these concepts through elements like light, time and perception.
“My observation-based paintings explore phenomenological relationships between light, time, and shifting perception, and how reality can be represented as it is reconsidered over time. The paintings are a record of ongoing transitions, rather than a seamless illusion of a single moment,” she wrote.
Both her physical surroundings and the events of her life have heavily influenced the work she has made. She said she will discuss how she has learned to fold her experiences and perspective into her work as she has grown and evolved as an artist.
“Location, things going on in my life, all of those things influenced the work as it changed, and then as I grew as an artist and understood how to fold in more, or to develop a language of my own,” she said. “So, the paintings now are really complex, multilayered paintings that are encompassing many moments in time and many responses to what I’m experiencing.”
“The paintings are very reflective of an experience, as the person who makes them, but also for the viewer who is looking at them. They’re all about the process of coming to understand the world and it’s a kind of understanding that doesn’t happen in another way, it really only comes through working through it,” Pierce added.
Pierce’s work is currently on view on the second floor of Fowler-Kellogg Art Center as part of the “Simpatico: Works by 2024 School of Art Faculty” exhibition. The exhibition closes on Aug. 11.
