Traverse | Arts + Literature Laboratory | Madison Contemporary Arts Center

Traverse

Stephanie Barenz is a mixed-media artist who merges printmaking, drafting, drawing, painting, and photography. She traveled extensively before settling down in the midwest, including a year spent in China and another in Italy. The concept of the journey, and its ability to change someone as they move through new regions, neighborhoods, or cultures left its mark on her art making.

The exhibition title, Traverse, is a nod to the series’ focus on moving through and experiencing new locations. Barenz is interested in exploring the idea of displacement that comes along with travel, and how it is often resolved through the hospitable gestures and offerings of others. As an architectural term, “traverse” is used to explain something that extends or connects from one side of structure to another. Barenz uses this as a metaphor to speak to the empathetic connections that can and do take place between the displaced and the placed. Formally, Barenz uses a visual vocabulary of heightened perspective views, circles, geometric shapes, architecture, and silhouetted figures to explore these themes.

An opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 11, 7-9pm. The exhibition will be on view through April 1, 2017.

Stephanie Barenz is an artist who creates mixed media works that are inspired by the powerful and intimate relationships between our external surroundings and our internal landscapes. Her creative practice merges photography, printmaking, painting, and collage, and responds to the transformative potential that is realized through encounters with new spaces, often those centered around bodies of water. 

Barenz holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and has taught at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. She ran her studio in Milwaukee for over five years and moved to Madison in 2022 after teaching art for five years at Concordia International School in Shanghai. She now works out of her east-side studio in the Madison Enterprise Center.

Stephanie has completed residencies at the Art Students League of New York, the Chicago Printmakers’ Collaborative, and the Pfister Hotel AiR program. She has exhibited her works at selected exhibition sites including... Read More

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Arts + Literature Laboratory is located at 111 S. Livingston Street #100, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703.

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