Arts + Literature Laboratory presents A Walk with Water, an exhibition by Stephanie Barenz, from Tuesday, March 19, 2024 through April 20, 2024. The exhibition will be on display in the first floor lobby space and the second floor mezzanine. Note: the work in the first floor lobby space will be on display through Saturday, April 13.
A reception for all current exhibitions will be held Thursday, April 11, 2024 from 6:30pm to 8:30pm.
Exhibition Statement:
The work I created for A Walk With Water is about how our external surroundings shape our internal landscapes. Slow acts of noticing transform our lives from feeling uninhabitable to a feeling of belonging. Walking or finding ways to access the world through our senses allows us to hold two opposites in our minds: The permanence we feel when we ground ourselves in nature and the impermanence of nature itself. We belong to ourselves, our places, and each other, yet those relationships constantly change and transform. These ideas are represented for me in landscapes defined by water. They are grounding yet evolving all at once.
The scenes in this collection are from places that have shifted my understanding of home — from Shanghai to Southeast Asia to Lake Mendota. Each place stood out to me because they shared my vision of my home regardless of location.
Like water, my work is fluid, using several processes, including printmaking, collage, painting, and digital drawing. Printmaking has fostered in me a love for the playfulness and chance involved in techniques of iteration, where matrices are used and re-used in new ways. I often combine figurative traces of my immediate or recollected surroundings with abstract mark-making—for example, painting over digital collages or transferring them onto different surfaces. This layering of forms—and of aesthetic traditions, both Western and Eastern—is analogous to the layering of experiences that has characterized my travels, where objective reality is shaded by the subjective experience of it.
