Stefanie Wolfson
Land scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW longer felt connected to. I took those works and destroyed them. I used their remnants to create collages. I was satisfied with the outcome of it and wanted to see if I could recreate it in a fresh way. I used an older screen, that I used for another edition of prints, and printed the whole page with that. I then layered the woodcut on top of it. This process creates a very interesting look when examined in person. The areas where the oil based relief ink sits on top of the acrylic silkscreen ink creates a sort of luminesces which adds an ethereal quality to the print.
What has at once captured our attention of Skull & Moon Diptych is the way it captures non-sharpness with an universal kind of language quality marks out a considerable part of your production, that are in a certain sense representative of the relationship between emotion and memory. How would you define the relationship between abstraction and representation in your practice? In particular, how does representation and a tendency towards abstraction find their balance in your work?
The relationship between abstraction and representative aesthetic is essential to my work. Many contemporary abstracted works of art, through overt and intentional abstraction, are not accessible to a casual viewer. Although my work is abstract, it is accessible and has a universal meaning to it, which I find many contemporary works lack. The fact that my work represents ideas and landscapes that most, if not all, viewers have experienced allows it to be enjoyed by a wider audience.
As you have remarked once, your landscapes are created as a form of meditation and we have appreciated the way they urge the viewers to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship, drawing from their personal substratum in order to create a personal form of meditation: so we would take this occasion to ask you how do you consider the relationship between memory and experience in your process. In particular, do you think that personal experience is an absolutely indispensable part of a creative process... Could a creative process be disconnected from direct experience?
Due to the heavy abstraction and dreamlike nature of much of my work, its interpretation relies heavily on memory and experiences from the viewer. When making art, I am mostly concerned with creating an immersive experience for the viewer. This can be seen in my more recent body of work,“ Intimate Immensity”. These works were based loosely on a chapter in Gaston Bachelard’ s book,“ The Poetics of Space”. Which simultaneously deals with the incomprehensible immensity of nature