Stephany is a former student of University High School and recent graduate of the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture where she studied painting and philosophy. She paints at her studio in west Berkeley. She also works at the nearby Artworks Foundry, where she assists in casting bronze sculptural work for other artists using the ancient “lost wax” technique.
For Stephany, the studio as a lab where she studies the skills we all acquire as we try to master our environment. As she paints, she strives to falsify hypotheses. She observes the process involved in making a simple object, when we attempt to make something “work”, and when we learn to use tools to accomplish a task. Physical tasks prove particularly alluring for Stephany, who likes to work systematically (even in something as nonlinear as “art”), to track variables as a means to better grasping the world. She is curious about the challenge of acting rationally (performing in ways consistent with achieving our goals), when clearly humans have non-rational drives (and perhaps “Art” at its best might celebrate those drives). The challenge of acting rationally engages our search for better and worse ways to proceed, or more generally how to cope, and hence reveals our values.
The work in Drawn To The Machine explores the psychological and emotional space we enter when we make or fix physical objects. Both tasks challenge us to look more clearly at the facts of our environment that we may not yet understand, in order to make things happen. As a person learns to use a hammer properly, she comes to appreciate new details about herself and her physical situation (like the density of the wall in front of her, or the various ways to strike the head of a nail such that it anchors securely into the wall.) She suddenly recognizes realities in front of her, which before were hidden or foreign. Meaning shows up; that is, value distinctions appear (between good and bad hammering, let’s say) where before there was no “better” or “worse”. Entire new worlds of facts open up, and slowly we recognize and gain familiarity with what matters to us.
The machinery that stars in the earlier work in this show is tooling from “Big Science” projects such as the Large Hadron Collider and its construction at CERN. What does it look like when we use tools to try to understand the world, and address physical challenges? To paraphrase the Wizard of Oz, these machines-behind-the-machines commanded Stephany to pay close attention to the machines behind the curtain.
Turn and Roll
Ink on clayboard
30" x 36"
More recently, upon returning to the Bay Area, Stephany’s practice has “come home” to a place where scientists, engineers, and sustainability enthusiasts are handcrafting solutions to global challenges, and encouraging amateurs to hack their way through problems at home. Immersed in the San Francisco bay area’s “maker” or “D.I.Y” culture, Stephany hopes her paintings might provide visual access to the people and projects that she thinks are “getting it right.”
In an era when America has been faulted for losing interest in what we make and manufacture, the work in Drawn To The Machine celebrates a forgotten American ethic. Much has been lost in this age when products are made for us to discard, or can only be repaired by experts. Perhaps the paintings and drawings here remind us of how (even in subtle ways) we feel empowered and autonomous when we learn to make our own stuff. These challenges encourage curiosity. They reward critical thinking. Drawn To The Machine celebrates the humbling challenge of “making” objects—an antidote to the anxiety, alienation, restlessness, and narcissism so common to contemporary life.