View From High Places

Stirred by the view from my studio window of a snow-covered landscape, View from High Places, evokes the groundless feeling of loss and potential that comes prior to a moment of personal change. Each brick is folded from templates I printed on tissue paper to conjure an architectural blueprint. Rather than a solid structure resulting from the information contained on my ‘blueprints,’ these bricks become actual building blocks, resulting in something tenuous, poetic, and magical.

I work with paper because of its ephemeral nature and its easy expression of ordinariness. Paper is the vehicle for memories, both individual and collective, from the stories made material in printed books, to the designs of a sketch or to-do list, to the disposable paper plates and cups of a large outdoor party.

Blueprints and the planning process that goes into building a permanent structure inspired my installation “View from High Places.” I used cyanotype-hued ink to print folding templates on pieces of tissue paper that would be assembled into hollow bricks. The bricks accompany a 15’ wide landscape engraving of the still and snow-covered parking lot view from my studio window.

The installation is comprised of a tenuous tower of these paper bricks, huge and swaying on its grid of strings with a single window looking out on the printed landscape image. Standing between the tower and the printed image, viewers stretch their imaginations back and forth between three and two dimensions for a full understanding of the landscape. This dimensional variation has an affective quality: there is something ephemeral and almost bittersweet about the blue used in cyanotypes or blueprints. The pigment will fade in most environments, so anything printed in the blueprint method is intended to convey only provisional ideas, not a concrete, finished product. In this way, the blueprint poetically mirrors the solid structures that result from their design, the latter being built to last, and the former meant only to help usher a permanent structure into existence.

Excerpt from Philagrafika 2010: Carrie Scanga at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Amze Emmons, Printeresting.org

“Carrie Scanga‘s recent solo exhibition View from High Places is stunning in its defiance of gravity…The show is really stunning, the majority of the modest gallery space is taken up with a floating tower. The tower is constructed of blue bricks that upon close inspection are schematic drypoint prints folded into bricks and then stacked on top of a delicate, nearly invisible lattice of filament (use caution when entering the gallery so you don’t clothesline yourself and topple the art). At the top of a tower is a single window that looks down upon a huge drypoint print on three full sheets of translucent Gampi paper (seen below), hung lightly on magnets. The view from the artist’s studio window? It’s hard to say but the collision of the fairy tale like tower with the austere, hard scrabble landscape is striking.”