Carol Prusa

Artist Statement

Building on the metaphor of the "dome of heaven" as a visual container for what we know, this body of work consists of painted three-dimensional acrylic hemispheres ranging from bowl-sized to five feet in diameter. The dome paintings are a visual embodiment - a download of sorts - of what it feels like to be alive while in conversation with contested cosmologies. Using fabricated acrylic hemispheres that I sandblast and gesso to prepare a curved, geometric ground, silverpoint (a thin silver wire) is used to deposit silver in hatching marks on the gesso layer to create the under-drawing. The underlying forms are heightened with titanium white pigment bound in acrylic polymer to create forms that visually coalesce and simultaneously dissolve in a washed matrix of ground graphite. Fiber optics are added to create a pattern of as many as seven hundred lights programmed to flicker on the surface.

The global culture of science in the twentieth century has led me to respond to "advances" that describe our world and our place in it. Like scientists, I am interested in envisioning the governing theories of our universe although I skeptically critique claims of complete knowledge (truth) and embrace relativity and mystery. As astronomers make educated guesses about a "dark" energy, I too contemplate the fate of the universe and my own uncertainty and discontinuity. Contemplating the limitless magnitude of the universe through the lawlessness of the imagination fills my mind with, as Edmund Burke said thoughts of infinity did his, "a sort of delightful horror."

Yielding to intuition, my newest work, "Entanglement," uses the "heavenly canopy" of my collected, unified and illuminated world expressed on the exterior of the dome, to cradle other possibilities inside. Because of the immateriality and potential complexity of light and video, I have utilized magnifying optics to visually expand the expression of space within and reveal a video projecting inside the dome.

As a "conceptual voyager" I intuit visual solutions to problems contemplated by cosmologists, seeking to conjure a balance between expansion and collapse without asserting an absolute. As I visually play with the frothy flux created when scientists and artists imagine, each work posits, as George Johnson suggests science does, "... a glorious human construction, an artful fitting of the data into a carefully crafted mental framework, a construction of towers that just possibly might have been built another way." As artists and scientists seek to explain our place, I join these dreamers of the "whole" to imaginatively visualize the creative matrix existing within all domes or paradigms and offer possibilities while embracing indeterminacy - where the boundary between myself and what I observe is blurred.

Bio

Carol Prusa was born in Chicago, earned her B.S from the University of Illinois and M.F.A. from Drake University. She currently teaches painting as an Associate Professor of Art at Florida Atlantic University.  She has been in numerous exhibitions and her work is in private and public collections including the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, the Telfair Museum, the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, and the Arkansas Art Center. Her work traveled in the Triennial Exhibition of German and American Artists curated by the American Museum of Arts and Design, NYC, exhibited at the Museum for Angewandte Kunst - Frankfurt and at the Museum of Arts and Design.  

Selected One Person Exhibitions

2009  Successive Approximations, University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor, Maine

2009  Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, Florida (upcoming)

2009  Entanglement, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami

2008  Spooky Action, Finestra non-profit space, Fine Arts Building, Chicago

2007-8  Threshold, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami

2007  Coherent Structures - Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, Florida

2006  Eyebiters , Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami

2006  To Be Us, Lakatamia Municipalia, Nicosia Cyprus

2005  Silverpoint Painting, Carol Prusa, Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock Arkansas

Selected Curated, Group Exhibitions

2009   Silverpoint Artists, Evansville Museum of Art, Evansville, Indiana

2009   Five Artists, Kentler International Drawing Space, Brooklyn, New York (upcoming)

2009  Painters not Painting, Rutgers Art Gallery, Philadelphia

2008  Grey, Miller-Block Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts

2008  Drawn to Detail, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts

2008  Shades of Grey, Frist Center for the Arts, Nashville, Tennessee (five-person)

2008  Consortium Fellowship exhibition - Ft. Lauderdale Art Museum, Florida

2007  Homegrown Southeast 2007, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC

2006  The Luster of Silver: Contemporary Metalpoint, Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia

2006  Think Warm: Miami Draws for You, Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

Selected Public Collections

Miami Art Museum
U.S. Embassy, Nicaragua
University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida
Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Missouri
Telfair Museum, Savannah, Georgia
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida
Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, Arkansas
Museum of Art - Fort Lauderdale, Florida