Today we’d like to introduce you to Shaina Gates.
Shaina, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I grew up in Groton, MA, playing in the swamp behind my house with my two brothers. We could figure out the time of day or the way home based on the direction of the shadows. This gave me an early understanding of the relationship between time and location. As I’ve moved around the U.S., ultimately landing back here in New England, my sense of physical position in relation to memory/past has remained at the forefront of my experience. My BFA is in Painting, from the Rhode Island School of Design. After undergrad, I moved to the Outer Cape, then to Oregon, then Los Angeles, before attending grad school in New York City for a degree in Art Education. I taught art for several years before deciding to commit to making art full time. I returned to school for my MFA at the University of Pennsylvania. The ideas that I developed during that time are what have led me to the kind of work I’m making now.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
I make highly realistic paintings and drawings of folded and crumpled paper. This came out of a body of work in the Trompe L’œil tradition–using a narrow depth of field to make images seem as though they are actually taped or pinned to the surface of the canvas. This allows me to condense multiple layers of information and moments in time into one flat space. I began including unfolded origami into the imagery. The creases in the paper retain the “memory” of the form they had once been. By painting or drawing them, that history is preserved in the image while being reduced to just a thin skin of paint or trails of graphite. I like how the physical artwork and the image’s past are compressed into one.
Since I began using crumpled rather than folded paper, I’ve become focused on the idea that the chaos of the creases actually represents the same kind of recorded history as the organized folding. There is something called the “Fold and Cut Theorem” that Eric Demaine at MIT has researched at length. With some of my images, rather than folding, I’m doing a ‘crumple and cut’ that produces a fractal-like version of this idea. I’m also playing with a ‘crumple and trace,’ which results in a mapped path broken across the surface.
Similar to the origami, the path of the cut/trace can (theoretically) be used to design another fold pattern that can re-produce the same path. For me, this potential held within such a compact set of information is analogous to the highly realistic, flattened imagery of Trompe L’œil. More generally, the act of drawing/painting in this way points back to that experience in the swamp–of time and location being locked together. The particular point of contact with the surface holds onto the moment between past and future. When I finish these specific images of the flattened paper, I savor the feeling of how I am held just outside of that plane. The image… the information it contains, the act of drawing at the tip of the pencil… it’s all pressing up against the surface of the work, perfectly condensed. I like the expanded sensation of being placed outside of that.
How can artists connect with other artists?
Reach out and exchange studio visits. Go to openings. I’m a pretty introverted person but doing these two things keeps me from feeling isolated in my work.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
My website is ShainaGates.com, where I show a single recent work and an updated exhibition calendar. There is a link to my Instagram @shainagates, which is where I post most of my work. I’m in a new show titled “Mix Tape” that opens June 7th at the Larsen Gallery in Concord, NH, and will be up through July. I’m always happy to have people come visit my studio–just get in touch through email, my website, or Instagram.
Contact Info:
- Website: ShainaGates.com
- Phone: 9788357553
- Email: shainagates@gmail.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/shainagates
Image Credit:
Shaina Gates
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