statement

An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now.
You don't really believe you're there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.”
-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

My paintings, drawings, and installations embody the inability to convey the significance of an event or the impact of a place. Therefore I think the actual content of the work resides in the attempt, the trying often futilely to communicate meaning. The work draws upon the traditions of landscape painting and natural science illustration, and incorporates the visual language of maps, diagrams, and artifacts, as a way of exploring our connection many times via objects to specific places and occurrences. Compelled by the variety of ideas about and human interactions with the land and landscape, I begin to investigate personal and universal significance of place.

I often focus on the idea of object as souvenir. Although the act of choosing a souvenir is usually individual, the adoption of souvenirs (and/or imbuing an object with significance of some sort) is universal across time and cultures. I find that certain objects, such as elements of detritus or those found in nature, are the lowest common denominator since they cost nothing and are easily found. They are also items to which I am personally attracted and which I have been collecting and arranging throughout my life. My drawings and paintings engage both the idea of the souvenir (those objects we take away to commemorate an experience: stones, sea glass, preserved plantlife, etc.) along with the idea of the artifact (those markers we leave behind in order to communicate something, sometimes just a gesture of our passing presence: stone cairns, spray painted directives, grafittied tags, etc.). I find many of the objects and images depicted while running and exploring, whether locally or while traveling. Expanding the notion of the souvenir to snippets from photographs, even images from existing artwork seen in galleries and museums, I use these elements as a starting point for study and contemplation, and plan compositions around them.

In installations, I'm most interested in the ways in which the paintings, drawings on paper, their silver-leafed cut-outs, painted flora, reflective surfaces, and light can all interact and create a larger conversation between object and atmosphere, between the taken and the left. As humans generally conflate places, experiences, even dreams in our memories, with my installations I'm hoping to create spaces in which such jumbled significance is a felt presence.

These fluid processes of investigation and making strike both a balance and a tension between inward and outward looking selves. I find that the resulting work is essentially diaristic involving a fracturing of place and time taking pieces of experience and reassembling them into new, conflated impressions and narratives.

bio

born: 1978, Augusta, Georgia

education

Northern Illinois University, MFA, 2004
University of Dayton, BA, 2001

selected awards/honors

Juror's Choice Award, 6th Annual Drawing Discourse, S. Tucker Cooke Gallery, University of North Carolina, Asheville, North Carolina, 2015
SÍM Residency, Reykjavík, Iceland, 2013
Artist Studio Residency, Solo Exhibition, and Stipend, Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno, 2012
Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty Award for Creative Activity, Eastern Michigan University, 2012

selected publications

Fresh Paint Magazine Issue 6, juried by Alicia Puig, 2015
"Amy Sacksteder", by Lauren Rice for The Studio Visit (thestudiovisit.com), May 27, 2012
"Best art of 2010 found in unlikely places", by Lauren Viera for the Chicago Tribune, December 17, 2010
New American Paintings, Midwest Edition #77, 2008

selected solo or two-person exhibits

Dayton Visual Arts Center, Amy Sacksteder: The Interior, solo exhibition, Dayton, Ohio, 2015
Neon Heater, Amy Sacksteder & Adrian Hatfield: A Nighttime Hole in a Daytime Sky, Findlay, Ohio, 2015
Ann Arbor Art Center, SightSee: Colin Blakely & Amy Sacksteder, two-person exhibition, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2013
University Center Gallery, University of Montana, Middle West, two-person exhibition with Nicole Pietrantoni, Missoula, Montana, 2013

selected group shows

Galveston Art Center, Urban Ecologies, Galveston, Texas, 2015
Lincoln Center Gallery, Incite Insight, Fort Collins, Colorado, 2014
PASSENGER Exhibition Space, Who is PASSENGER?, Detroit, Michigan, 2014
Robert and Elaine Stein Galleries, Wright State University, Above and Below, Dayton, Ohio, 2015