BIOGRAPHY
Susan Chorpenning has shown work in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Germany, San Francisco and Marfa, TX.
Exhibitions have included:
Galerie Arnaud LeFebvre, Paris
Loiter Gallery, Dangerous Curve and Phantom Galleries, Los Angeles
Brian Gross Fine Art and Proarts, San Francisco and Oakland
Florence Lynch Gallery, Jim Kempner Fine Art, The Knitting Factory, Gail Gates, NYC
Stadtische Galerie, Würzburg, Belleview-Saal, Wiesbaden, and Kunstmuseum Heidenheim, Germany
From studies in CA, she moved to NY, living and working there from 1980-2001, gladly returning to the golden light of Los Angeles in August, 2001. While in NY she not only showed her work, but participated in WAC, the Women’s Action Coalition, chairing the Art Action Committee in the 1990’s, flooding [terrifying] galleries with faxes suggesting they increase their representation of women, artists of color and LGBT artists (as they were called at the time), and compiling statistics on representation. She also chaired a panel at WCA previewing the National Museum of Women in the Arts, now established in Washington DC.
Main influences include the California light, and her longtime meditation practice, as well as years spent in Berkeley and New York. Chorpenning’s theory has been that an artist can make work anywhere, as she has proved in artists’ residencies (Chinati, Wiesbaden, Omi, Joshua Tree) and multiple on-site installations in Europe, NY and CA. She now works in a studio in Altadena, nestled into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, using reflective light, paint, and whatever comes to hand. (Download C.V.)
Statement: Light is the source for my work.
I’ve used light in many variations and permutations, always involved with the sensual experience of looking, and the perceptual experience of seeing.
For thirty years I did site-specific installations focused on daylight, light and shadow, or lights at night, classified as the Light Rooms and Dark Rooms series. Early performative work included sound/projection pieces, projecting light onto phosphorescent backdrops, turning light off to leave shadows hanging, building up in layers as pure light images flicked on and off.
Light Rooms
Dark Rooms
The body intervened in this work, using silhouetted figures as the imagery within the projections. Furniture with embedded light (photo flash units) required the body of the viewer for its function, as did photograms made with sun on the body. These works often referenced memory, sometimes using words (“I remember”), sometimes the image of light itself crossing space as a memory of the moving light. (Sculpture and the Body)
Then I added drawing, itself a visceral, body-oriented activity, beginning with graphite and oilstick, often working in layers, scraping off one layer to expose what was underneath, similar to the work with layers of light. The touch of hand to work continues to support me. But I think as a 3D artist, seeing multiple dimensions, as recent paintings illustrate. Layers and Planes will not remain contained on flat surfaces, but move off the wall, situating themselves between painting and sculpture.
Layers and Planes 55
Paper Light
Inner Light and Light Circle
Most recently the work has moved again into literal light with the Inner Light, Outer Light and Light Circles series.
This recent work incorporates moving colored light, which slowly changes throughout the spectrum, evoking a calming, dreamy atmosphere, but always changing. Perhaps our awareness of the transitory nature of light, in all these works, leads to an awareness of our bodies’ presence as also transitory, which may, perhaps, lead back into the light.
Some paint softly absorbs light, while other paint is highly reflective. With these surfaces, I appeal to our human sensibilities, the equivalent of touch, but from a visual sense.
Both the Layers and the Paper Light series offer surfaces reactive to light, such as a tonal shift when the viewer moves, the glow of gold leaf, or the glittering particles of micaceous iron oxide.