Stephanie Barenz

medium: mixed media
portal wisconsin featured artist

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A Star To Steer By 2021 Painting	Where We Have Our Homes 2021 Painting	More Than Air, More Than Water 2022 Painting
Shattered Water 2022 Painting	Clear As Glass 2022 Painting	A Walk With Water 2022 Painting

Contact information
Artist resides in: Madison, WI
Email Address: stephaniebarenz@stephaniebarenz.com
Web site: www.stephaniebarenz.com

Artist statement
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, ??, 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.

Biography
Stephanie Barenz creates mixed media works inspired by the powerful and intimate relationships between our external surroundings and our internal landscapes. Merging photography, printmaking, painting, and collage, her creative practice responds to the transformative potential to be realized through encounters with new spaces—often those centered around bodies of water.

Barenz received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. She taught at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and ran her own studio and gallery in Milwaukee, WI. She has recently returned to Wisconsin after five years living in Shanghai. She has completed residencies at the Art Students League of New York, Chicago Printmakers’ Collaborative, and the Pfister Hotel in Wisconsin.

Selected exhibitions 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.