Artist: Megan Scheffer
Exhibition dates: October 9 – November 8, 2021
Artist Reception November 5, 5-7pm
Frontispace is at the entrance to the Art and Music Library
Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester
Hours can be found here: https://www.library.rochester.edu/about/hours/art-music
Frontispace is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by Megan Scheffer, In the absence of treatment. The exhibition includes intricate drawings, sculptures, and photographs that investigate, question, and attempt to translate systems and definitions of mental health. Works in the exhibition visually abstract mental illness, asylums, and the clinical and subjective language within the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
In “Safe” Settings, a series of photographs taken in the Austin State Hospital (previously known as the State Lunatic Asylum) and transferred onto packing tape, focuses on absence and the institutional architecture of psychological spaces.
In A Reductionistic Anachronism V2 connecting line drawings investigate obsessive, methodical actions that attempt to translate emotional, nonverbal, physical understandings of mental health into visual language.
Masking tape sculptures Limbic and Criteria render line drawings into abstract physical forms that mimic the subjectivity of classification and the desire to relate information that appears similar.
In the absence of treatment looks at mental illness through the lens of absence, trauma, loss, and the innate human desire to catalogue, diagnose, and fill in the gaps.
Megan Scheffer is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in Rochester, NY. She earned her BA in Studio Art and Psychology from Beloit College in 2010 and an MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2015. She attended the Vermont Studio Center Artist Residency and received the Fellowship Award for the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Artist Residency. Her work has received several awards including Best in Show and the People's Choice Award from the State of the Art Gallery (Ithaca, NY), Director’s Choice Award from Main Street Arts (Clifton Springs, NY), and the Edge Award from the Rochester Contemporary Art Center (Rochester, NY). Her work has recently been exhibited at RedLine Contemporary Art Center (Denver, CO), Katherine E Nash Gallery (Minneapolis, MN), Big Orbit Gallery (Buffalo, NY), Embark Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Exhibit A Gallery (Corning, NY), Mercer Gallery (Rochester, NY), and the Arnot Art Museum (Elmira, NY).
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