Faculty Sponsor: Professor Edward Lambert
Fabric Design
Lamar Dodd School of Art
University
of Georgia
"The body is not a thing; it is a situation." - Simone De Beauvoir
Stephanie Anderson is fascinated by the subjective relationship of the mind to its environment and the elusive boundaries between the two, emphasizing that "there are no true boundaries beyond one's own construction." She portrays this illusion in the works below through transparent layers of pigments. The result of this meticulous, additive process is a full web of subtlety in which each point of the design contains many different colors smilutaneously. Stephanie is not an easy person to find. Inquire around the art school, and it seems like everyone knows who she is. The problem, I discover, in my search to contact her to discuss her work: nobody knows where she is. I finally catch up with her at Unraveled, an ebullient performance of fabric, fashion and poetry that she planned with a handful of other artists, including Caitlin Martell and Theresa Sporer. She answers my questions about the CURO Symposium, but it is clear that she is eager to talk about her newest work, for which her face is shockingly, strikingly splattered with glitter and paint. "The concepts are very similar," she says of CURO and Unraveled. "But CURO was a very serious exhibition. We said we wanted to do something big, fun and obnoxious." The lights dim. As the show progresses and I watch the artists strip, escape cages and blowtorch each other, I muse that the performance has lived up to its aspirations. Stephanie seeks to capture the correlation between subject and environment; from my first contact with Stephanie she herself embodies this dynamism. In fact, judging by the real relationship she has to everyone and everything around her, she radiates a force all her own. "Art is supposed to be something that brings you into a world that's not the everyday," she explains. "People will walk away from it changed, rather than just viewing." If you ever decide to look for Stephanie Anderson, just don't look where you found her before. Because if you've seen it, she's already hard at work on her next venture.
Click on the image to view a high resolution version of the work.
