Carrie Scanga
Concession Stand, 7’ x 3’ x 11’; tracing paper, ink, glue; 2001; University of Washington School of Art, Seattle, WA. (Photo credit: Carrie Scanga)
“I find that I don’t want to copy the world or tell a story through my work but rather to invite viewers into the construction of an embodied experience.”
Carrie Scanga is an artist living and working in Portland, Maine (USA). Her approach to color is embodied and associative and her approach to printmaking involves installation, works on paper and artists books. Her delicate, printed paper installations are created with intaglio methods of printmaking as well as intricate folding techniques to create spatial experiences.
Currently, Carrie is working on Sanctuary–a social-practice print- and story-based installation and collaboration with writer Emily Rapp Black. Ongoing since before the Covid-19 pandemic, this piece travels between medical centers and other public spaces in the United States, collectively recording and processing participants’ stories of embodied change or personal rupture.
Are there specific associations towards color in your work?
My motivation for an installation project originates when I am inexplicably drawn to something I see and have an instinct to translate a symbolic or modular component of that sight into printed, three-dimensional forms. The color from the original sight lingers in my mind throughout intaglio platemaking, and I only convey the color into the world at the time of printing.
During color mixing, I often find that the color is difficult to define and that it’s actually many analogous hues or tints of a hue that I need to mix. This is probably because I’m attempting to put my finger on a memory of color, rather than working from observation.
I welcome this slipperiness of working from memory, because my body is a filter and mediator for the experience. I find that I don’t want to copy the world or tell a story through my work but rather to invite viewers into the construction of an embodied experience.
“Viewers feel strong physical reactions to being enveloped by printed color, just as I do while printing and accruing a studio full of it.”
Sanctuary, 12’ x 11’ x 11’; vapor printed and laser cut tracing paper, wood, aluminum; 2020; University of New England, Biddeford, ME. (Photo credit: Ron Harrity)
Echolocation, 8’ x 6’ x 16’; monotype on gampi tissue and bronze; 2015; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME. (Photo credit: Ron Harrity)
How does the printmaking process itself relate to how you work with color?
Like memory, the printmaking process is also a filter and mediator for truth about color in the world. Printed color, like color in the world, is variable and hinges on all kinds of physical properties (i.e., humidity, air temperature, time of day.)
When I print multiples, I’m comforted by how subtle variations in color—from one print to another--shift my own feeling toward my idea and complicate the story my work tells.
If you could eat a color for dinner, what color would you choose and how would it taste?
Decades ago, I made a piece of art called Concession Stand that my grad school critiques deemed a failure for its literalness. It was about feeling spiritually empty and walking up to a takeout window, and instead of receiving a tasty treat, obtaining sustenance from luminescent color. In retrospect, I think this piece is an exuberant declaration about my path as an artist. I am both the concession stand and the person looking for a treat, and making work sustains me, heals me, and connects me to purpose.
In my installations, color makes the embodied experiences I convey more accessible to a range of viewers. Viewers’ personal and cultural associations with color give them agency when experiencing or participating in one of my pieces.
Kandinsky wrote a lot about the “psychic effect” of color in his manifesto, linking color to religions and spiritual traditions. For me, the associations can be culturally symbolic, and they can be just as powerful when mundane and highly personal. For example, I heard viewers talk about how the exact yellow comprising Breathe: The Emergent Colony, was powerful because it was the color of monks’ robes or because it was the color of egg yolks seen on the breakfast plate daily. Viewers feel strong physical reactions to being enveloped by printed color, just as I do while printing and accruing a studio full of it. The visual depth and complexity of multi-varied hues fills and sustains us with a mysterious and overwhelming psychic and embodied connection. That is the tasty treat.
Breathe: The Emergent Colony, 44’ x 32’ x 12’; drypoint on tracing paper and gampi tissue, glue, string; 2012; PLUG Projects, Kansas City, MO. (Photo credit: Ron Harrity)