Visiting Artist, Heide Fasnacht will give an Artist Talk at Vermont Studio Center in the Red Mill Building on July 17, 2024, at 8:00 pm ET. This event is free and open to the public.
After receiving early recognition for her abstract sculpture in the 1980s, Fasnacht began creating stop-action-like sculpture and precise drawings of ephemeral, sudden or violent events in the mid-1990s, based on photographs from dated science textbooks and magazines. Critics connected them to work by Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Vija Celmins, but distinguished Fasnacht by her translation of two-dimensional sources into sculpture (rather than painting) that was "emphatically handmade" and open to fantasy, slippage of meaning, and abstraction.
Fasnacht's work plays with space, scale and time and in this sense relates to 1970s art that engaged in phenomenological explorations of experience, perception and objectivity. Nancy Princethal notes its focus on events that "fall at the threshold of visibility, in the realm of things that, while not imperceptible are more or less impossible to visualize in any stable, conventional way." Working at table-top to larger-than-human scale, Fasnacht has depicted cataclysmic events in miniature and minor experiences (e.g., sneezes) at great magnification, creating dissonances that lend moral ambiguity, paradox, and a sense of the absurd to her art. Her work's suspension of time converts moments of violence, loss or catharsis into objects of contemplation—of visual pleasure, danger, wonder, intellectual stimulation, foreboding or, paradoxically, humor—that Raphael Rubinstein described as "a kind of poetics of catastrophe." Her later paintings approach time differently, collapsing change and loss in the built environment across decades in single images.
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