Travel Patterns, installation by Sara Schnadt
Opening performance, September 2, 2011
On view September 2 through September 30, 2011, three new works by performance/installation artist Sara Schnadt created poetic spatial systems about personal and cultural relationships to site. All three works explored site, an accumulation of relationships to site, and resulting narratives as well as the sociopolitical and poetic implications of landscape.
Where I’ve Been And Where I Want To Go was a large installation completed during the opening on September 2, 2011, by the artist performing the chronology of her own travel history. A collage installation pieced together images from a wide range of current and historical sources including everywhere Schnadt had been and hoped to travel. Images were lined up by their horizon line and circulated the space at eye-level. As a meditation on the possibilities of travel and the impact of place on our own biographies, Schnadt traveled from location to location trailing a length of string behind her that become a growing plane across the space, a distillation of a travel history.
Also included in the show was Before You Go, Are You Here?, a sculpture about the psychology of wilderness travel and the idea of “getting away,” and Travelogue, a double-projection combining texts and images of landscape as a visual essay on changing and enduring perceptions of site and what they say about us.
“Where Sara departs dramatically from [traditional visualizations] including the hundreds of digital mappings found on www.visualcomplexity.com, which logs the delineation of everything from a day of the San Francisco public transportation network to Twitter lyrics to the Afghan conflict, is that her approach to the problem is three dimensional. It happens in real space and is meant to be explored by real bodies in real time.” —Lori Waxman, art critic for the Chicago Tribune and Art Forum, writing on Schnadt’s Network, Domestic Intervention
Chicago-based artist Sara Schnadt explores technology in her work both as subject and media. Her installations and performances use found objects, interactivity, projection, and movement derived from common gestures. Much of her work involves representations or data that translate large quantities of socially resonant information into poetic forms. Schnadt often performs within accompanying sculptural environments, attempting to articulate the personal within virtual and technological innovation. Schnadt has shown her work in Chicago at MCA Chicago’s 12×12: New Artists New Work, Hyde Park Art Center, Pop-Up Art Loop temporary gallery series, Looptopia, Site Unseen Performance Festival, What It Is project space, Balloon Contemporary, and Antena Gallery. National and international shows include Spatial City, An Architecture of Idealism at MOCAD Detroit, Exchange Rate public projection series in LA and NY, Upgrade!—Chain Reaction in Skopje, Macedonia, CINEA Paris, FreeManifesta Frankfurt, and the Busan Biennale in South Korea. She co-curates the IN>TIME Performance Series and is co-founder and technologist for Chicago Artists Resource website at the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. She also serves on the Artists Advisory Committee for the Chicago Artists Coalition.
Interview with Sara Schnadt, August 31, 2011.
“Travel Patterns” under construction at Counterpath, August 30, 2011