In Conversation: Karen Schifano Interviewed By Mel Prest

Karen Schifano, Installation view, “Boundary Hunters” at Nelson-Fosdick Gallery, Alfred University, 2012.

In Conversation: Karen Schifano Interviewed By Mel Prest

Mel Prest: Describe your favorite studio day: one you’ve had or one you’d like to have.

Karen Schifano: My ideal studio day would actually be a whole day in the studio. Most of the time, I can only squeeze in a few hours here and there since I work almost full-time as a painting restorer. I imagine the feeling of being in my own sanctuary with no deadlines, no computer, no place else to go—endless space and time with a feeling that anything and everything is possible. I would basically be puttering, moving around freely, letting ideas emerge without strain or too much over-thinking. My favorite times are actually beginning something new: the bravura and excitement of jumping in. But I need to feel free of all expectation and pressure in order to allow those ideas to come in the door.

MP: So ‘puttering,’ or play, is a part of your practice? I know that you have done several residencies, often to Provincetown in summer. Does that kind of time, and play, happen more often when you are on residency?

KS: I’ve had a residency at the MacDowell Colony and have gone to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown every September for more than fifteen years for a Returning Fellows Residency. It’s such a gift! The fact that I arrive with no old work or baggage allows me to try totally new things: the seeds that I then explore during the rest of the year. That said I also play around here in NYC as well. Sometimes, if I’ve been bearing down for a while on a particular series—for example, recently I’m playing with curved frame-like images—I’ll need to break out and mess around with tape or legos or fimo oven bake clay for a kind of palate cleansing.

MP: I can see you keep that freshness of inquiry in the work, the intense focus shifting from summer fellowships to navigating living/working in NY.

I think so-called Concrete/Reductive painting is a tug-of-war: concentrated cultivation and then improvisation with clarity. Do you feel this is an accurate way to begin describing your work?

KS: I’d more likely say improvisation with not so much clarity, but then, the focus snaps to suddenly. I’m chewing over what ‘concentrated cultivation’ might mean for me … possibly that I stick to a format that holds the general shape of a feeling that’s under my skin. For example, I had a window thing going for many years, which had a fascination for reasons that only came to me later on. Now I’m ‘cultivating’ the shapes of theater stages: open mouths, framed curvy spaces and I do many variations on all of these shapes so I guess that’s the improvisational aspect. All of these shape situations are kinds of openings that are also delimited by boundaries. There’s a flipping back and forth between figure and ground that’s endlessly fascinating to me. Clarity comes after a lot of repetition, adjustment, and dogged pursuit of that certain ‘rightness’ when it all comes together with a feeling that it was born this way.

Karen Schifano, Pirate, 2013. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 36 in.

MP: I think of you as a colorist and a space painter, working in the space between 2D and 3D. And then, the works spill onto the floor like in the show in Paris and now at the Institute Library in New Haven. Can you speak about that?

KS: The 2D-3D play has always been a concern of mine ever since attending Hunter College for my MFA. Ralph Humphrey, a beloved teacher there, spoke of the notion that paintings are also objects. I liked the literalness of that idea, the dumb fact of it. In a reversal a while back, I began using tape to make shapes on my studio walls and floor that seemed like cuttings into the literal plane and so object-less. I was painting at the same time and tried adding the tape to the paintings as extensions of the line elements on the canvas. From there, I jumped to paintings that sat at the edge of the wall and floor with tapelines that continued onto the floor and out into the viewer’s space. Eventually, I produced a series of painted “doors” that literally stood on the floor: literal objects combined with illusionary space; pictures of things that are things; images that are recognizable cultural conventions but also read as abstract shape. The piece at the Institute Library is tape over the spindles and banister of a stairway that runs across the floor to produce a parallelogram. This can also be read as the shadows cast by the spindles. It’s painting and sculpture at the same time—2D and 3D—and plays with perspective depending on where the viewer is standing.

Karen Schifano, Installation view, “Karen Schifano: I’ll Take You There”, Sydney Non-Objective Contemporary Art Project, 2012

Oh, and there’s the Parking Lot Interventions I did in 2011 with tape additions to parking lot spaces. It is also a kind of one-time performance in addition to the painting/sculpture mix. This past summer, in a solo exhibition in one of the spaces at SNO (Sydney Non-Objective Art Projects in Sydney, AUS), I used tape to create a framed space for four of the photographs from this series, as well as doorway/entryways and extended window spaces—wall to floor again.

MP: These works seem to exist in “families.” Do you move between different bodies of work? Have you always worked in series?

KS: I like your word “family” rather than series because there are groupings of spatial situations and shapes that I’m kind of married to for a while—I live with them, swim in their aura, even when I’m not in the studio. Some of them keep returning even after I’m on to something else and I try to give over to them if the impulse is strong enough.

MP: Sometimes your works remind me of sets for a stage—where something took place or is about to occur. Do you ever have this feeling?

KS: I do! My partner and her family came from theater and we’ve also spent time going to the opera. I love the empty stage, the giant curtains, the sense of possibility and excitement. This is a great metaphor for each moment that arrives—and the moment between the viewer and the painting as well. I want that feeling of a place where sparks fly.