THE ARMORY SHOW
AMY SCHISSEL
PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY
711 12th Avenue
Pier 90 and Pier 94
New York City
MARCH 4 TO 8, 2020
For The Armory Show 2020 edition, Miami-based artist Amy Schissel has created “From Here to There,” a paper-based, site-specific installation first conceived and created during the artist’s 2019 Residency at the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New Orleans. The installation is a multi-tiered, fantastical meta-narrative of worlds colliding as interpreted through a female lens. A re-mapping of our contemporary landscape visualizing junctures where physical, factual cartography melds with counterpart, effervescent, informational traffic, emphasizing the dematerialized quality of our data-driven culture. Covering the entire viewing space, the work appears as an immersive electronic skin—a hypothetical interface or gateway between our physical geography and vast, multilayered terrains of cyberspace. Marking out personal charts and rhizomatic journeys through analog and digital realms, the project is presented in layers of drawing and painting on paper, screen print, ink jet print, and paper relief sculpture.
Increasingly as we go about our 21st Century lives, we try to bridge the gap between spaces we see and navigate in the physical world and those we see and navigate in the online world. Augmented reality holds that every physical space is now interpenetrated with information. Physical spaces are also now informational spaces giving new dimensions to our contemporary landscape. Amy Schissel’s installations subscribe both to traditional cartography and Internet mapping to explore these new dimensions. She is interested in how location, or the contemporary ability via the world wide web to be everywhere and nowhere at once, presents contradictions of identity in geo-political relationships.
As the onset of digital information technology has altered traditional interpretations of personal and collective history and offset our traditional sense of civic flow, Schissel aims to map out new social cartographies that challenge ideas of identity via location, drawing out both junctures where physical geography and Net-space are interfaced. More specifically, the drawing process records physical and imaginary journeys of the contemporary body where historical truth and supposed accuracy in cartographical rendering meet the ever-fluctuating, boundary-dissolving, liquid architectures of cyberspace from the view point of a female navigator (in light of traditionally male-dominated fields of both Abstract Painting and STEM sciences), exploring, measuring, and marking out “new world” terrain. Schissel hopes to emphasize simultaneity between vast worlds where female legibility and ease of movement continue to be increasingly oppressed in current political climates.
As in past installations, Schissel seeks to pinpoint herself within rapidly shifting spatial relationships where digital and physical worlds meet. In a labor-intensive and process-oriented practice, a daily recording of repetitive mark-making becomes embodied and cerebral, drawing out chapters in a never-ending story. The artist envisions this installation emerging as a centerfold in a massive atlas, not only acting as an interface between physical and informational worlds, but displaying an extensive continuum of layered cartographies. The result is an instruction manual for how to build simultaneous worlds that encapsulate the multifaceted experience of being here, there, and everywhere—displaying an ever-shifting identity in an ultra-dynamic hyper-world.
Statement and Biography
Amy Schissel’s professional practice analyzes the role of painting and drawing in the Information Age. Schissel addresses the progressively dematerialized quality of digital society by visualizing and mapping information flows that cut through time and space, seemingly negating the need for geographical location for human interaction. She reinvents our contemporary landscape, fostering a sense of civic legibility where the World Wide Web calls us to be everywhere yet nowhere at once. As the 19th century gave us radical new ways to experience and move through space with the plane, train, and automobile, Schissel’s work addresses our present, even more radically different, experience of space driven by the multifaceted virtual worlds of the Internet’s network spaces. Her drawings, paintings, and installations are infused with information friction and subscribe to modes of representation of new virtual spaces and special effects to build architectures of fictional space. Notational devices drawn from digital architecture, interaction design, and digital mapping schemata clash with exploding vectors, imploding pathways, and webs of connectivity. A walk-through of the artist’s installations brings a spacial and bodily awareness of the many interfaces and gateways to The Cloud’s invisible networks, intersections, and connectivity infusing the “everydayness” of our environments and connecting us across physical boundaries. Schissel intends for the viewer to experience layered cartographies melding disparate worlds, whose multifaceted surfaces echo one’s intuitive movement and interaction in an ultra-dynamic hyper-world.
Amy Schissel is based in Miami, Florida where she is an Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of Miami. She earned a BFA and MFA from the University of Ottawa and is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2016 Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist in Residence Award. She is also the recipient of the 2014 RBC Emerging Artist Award; a 2011 finalist in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition; and the Brucebo Foundation Fine Arts Award. She has exhibited her work across the U.S. and internationally and has lectured in Halifax, Toronto, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. Her work can be found in the collections of the Royal Bank of Canada; West Virginia Museum of Fine Art; Global Affairs Canada (Embassy of Brussels, New Zealand Consulate); University of Brussels; Gotland Museum of Fine Art; City of Ottawa Art Collection; Canada Council Art Bank; and in numerous international private and corporate collections. In collaboration with Patrick Mikhail, she has exhibited in solo projects at The Armory Show 2020, Volta Basel 2014 and 2017, Volta New York 2013 and 2016, Papier Montreal, and Art Toronto.
The Armory Show is New York City’s premier art fair and a leading cultural destination for discovering and collecting the world’s most important 20th- and 21st-century art. The Armory Show features presentations by leading international galleries, innovative artist commissions, and dynamic public programs. Since its founding in 1994, The Armory Show has served as a nexus for the art world, inspiring dialogue, discovery, and patronage in the visual arts.
The Armory Show was founded by four New York gallerists – Colin de Land, Pat Hearn, Matthew Marks and Paul Morris – who sought a platform to present and promote new voices in the visual arts. In its 25 years, The Armory Show has stayed firm to its mission while establishing itself as an unmissable art event set in the heart of New York City.
For more detailed information about The Armory Show, including full show schedule and tickets please visit: https://www.thearmoryshow.com/