(Glen Falls, New York, 1968- )
Lives and works in Paris
Sandra Scolnik paints tiny genre paintings
in which every character in the drab, tightly confined interior space
is a self-portrait, with her face on each figure. The locations for
these works span history, with settings ranging the present day American
interiors to eighteenth-century Russia, and times and places in
between. Her face is almost always painted with an expressionless
stare, so only the figures' bodies, dress, poses, and interactions
with one another surrenders any sense of what might be happening
within the image. The figures within her paintings almost never engage
one another, nor do they seem engaged in their surroundings. The
settings are themselves disquieting and unsafe, and offer no refuge.
Indeed, they are unsafe since Scolnik has applied paint in certain
areas so that it will eventually wear off to reveal another painting
hidden underneath: the figure will remain, but the spaces they inhabit
will morph into new, unknown spaces. The fact that Scolnik herself
will have died by the time her self portrait is transformed into
a new scene beautifully illustrates one of Scolnik’s larger concerns:
the formation and contingent nature of individual identity. |
