Emanuela Harris-Sintamarian
Seven Time Art Party Participant
die Gesetze der Strukturen (The Laws of Structures)
Artist’s Website
www.emahsin.com
Artist’s Statement
As an artist, I am interested in choices: what remains to be seen, what is absent and how decisions are made.
As an artist originally from Romania, my work is informed by the relationship between my identity and my sense of displacement, memory/narrative, movement/changes, and the ways I have devised to reconcile these incongruous elements. My intricate yet expansive drawings tackle the dichotomy between containment and liberation by infusing a static diagram with a charge that propels it into motion.
I incorporate in my visual lexicon, elements that either borrow directly from or reference Eastern European folklore, Constructivism, architectural diagrams and color theory charts. Collectively, these references also create complex and fractured allegorical “maps” of my physical, emotional, and intellectual journey—a means to explore loss itself as a form of identity that transforms the schema of containment into a ritualized form of self-expropriation.
Within my newest works, I explore not only space and its division but also the fluidity and tension of contradictions: organized chaos and uncontrolled order, machine-like generated images and imperfections, fictitious and concrete, recognizable/known and suggested. I also connect the dichotomies intrinsic to motion (past-present/past-future; transfer vs. change; progress vs. regress; action vs. reaction), with memory and perception: how do we remember stories/information, and how do we retell the stories or make associations between the pieces of information that we have. My aim is to map an articulated visual system of understanding the movement between memory and a posteriori experiences.
About the Artist
I was born in Bucharest, Romania, where I did my undergrad studies at the University of Fine Arts. While in college I received a couple of scholarships in Italy (Instituto Romeno di Cultura-Venice) and France (under the tutelage of Association Culturelle de Saint Remy de Provence). In 1999 I came for the first time to the United States in an one-month student exchange program. I volunteered to assist and participate in opening a basic art program for the children of a Sioux Falls Reservation (South Dakota). In the summer of 2000, I returned to the United States on a scholarship offered by the University of Delaware, where I received my first MFA in Printmaking. In 2005, I received my second MFA in Painting at San Jose State University.
Since I relocated to the Bay Area (2002), I have shown at various venues around the Bay, including: Jack Fischer Gallery, Frey & Norris Gallery, ArtSF, SoEX, (San Francisco), Swarm Gallery and ProArts (Oakland), Triton Museum, (Santa Clara), ICA, Works Gallery, Anno Domini (San Jose) to name just a few. I have also shown in New York, Delaware, New Jersey, Philadelphia, as well as Sweden, France, Canada, Austria, Italy and Romania. In 2005 I was nominated for the SECA SFMOMA Award, in 2008 I was the recipient of the 2008 ArtShift Award; the Artist’s Grant Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, and the AIR Program Grant from Works Gallery. In 2010 I was the recipient of the 2010 Silicon Valley Arts Council Award. Over the years I have been in several residencies (such as the Djerassi, Vermont Studio Center, Works, and ICA-San Jose)