About Stephanie Barenz
Art brings us back to ourselves.
Having lived a life of constant movement, I often go for walks in nature as a means of grounding myself. Through my art, I hope to share that same sense of relief and calm with the viewer.
We can never go back to an exact experience as it once was. My art honors the places and times that have felt like home so that as we move forward through life’s challenges and changes, we don’t lose touch with that feeling of connectivity and calm.
Nature is constantly changing, yet constantly there. It is reliable. In life, the only constant is change. Learning to ground oneself in visions of nature is learning to ground oneself despite the consistency of change.
Formal Training & Background
My art practice is rooted in years of study both in the USA and abroad.
Having received my MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, I taught at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and ran my own studio and gallery in Milwaukee, WI. I also completed residencies at the Art Students League of New York, the Chicago Printmakers’ Collaborative, and the Pfister Hotel in Wisconsin.
Selected exhibition sites include Sino ArtSpace in Shanghai, Solonia Art Center in Suzhou, Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Wisconsin Art, John Michael Kohler Art Center, and the Walker’s Point Center for the Arts in Milwaukee.
During my five years of living in Shanghai, I taught at Concordia International School in Shanghai and also for a year in Hangzhou, China. I have led workshops at art education conferences in Hong Kong and Taipei.
Artist Statement
“Fare forward, voyagers”
--T. S. Eliot
My work explores the profound relationship between our external surroundings and our internal landscapes, be they mental, emotional, or spiritual. Having lived a large portion of my adult life abroad, I have realized the great importance of encountering a broad range of people and places in order to arrive at a more complete sense of self, but also a greater sense of shared humanity.
In the course of both my artistic and my life journeys, I have been particularly drawn to water. I came of age near some of the largest lakes in the world, The Great Lakes. My studies unfolded in a city on the storied Mississippi River. I have lived in coastal Shanghai, 上海, Chinese for “On the Sea” and near West Lake in Hangzhou. Water’s many material and geographic forms, powerfully represent movement, transition, flow, and change. The power and pull of water are due to its prominent place within the course of human history, shaping geographies and moving us across and between continents. Water also moves within us, giving us life as it has all life on Earth. And yet like the unpredictable and ever-changing nature of human experience, so the course of flowing water is often uncertain, subject to change.
Formally, my work—like water—is fluid, using several processes, including printmaking, collage, painting, and digital photography. Printmaking has fostered in me a love for the playfulness and chance involved in processes of iteration, where matrices are used and re-used in new ways. I often combine figurative traces of my immediate or recollected surroundings with abstract mark-making—for example in painting over digital collages or transferring them onto different surfaces. This layering of forms—and of aesthetic traditions, both Western and Eastern—is analogous to the layering of experiences that has characterized my travels, where objective reality is shaded by the subjective experience of it.
Creation and geographical movement are similar in that they can both disorient and offer direction. This is the paradox that motivates my work. The search is for what can hold an individual together as they move through uncertainty, as they respond—joyfully, if also reluctantly—to an urgency that might naturally draw them away from one home in search of another.