About Artist Kate Sciandra
From Buffalo, NY | Lives & Works in Minneapolis, MN
Obsessed with seeing, yearning for connection, passionate about sharing voice and vision, art is my food, my balm, my drug of choice.
My work is centered on the idea of the seer and what is seen and how they intersect. My rich and varied life experiences have shaped a unique vision about how I see the world, interact with it, and express that interaction.
We are in a world that is flooded with images. However, very few that speak to an authentic experience. Social media and phone cameras allow everyone to document their lives, but there is a lack of vulnerability and connection. I strive to have the art I produce to be a counterpoint to that, modeling the authenticity that I see lacking and yet so important to living with each other.
The themes that flow through all my work are intimacy, vulnerability, and authenticity. I am fascinated by the unexpected view of the things we see everyday. These are the details of everyday objects or unusual viewpoints that create a new level of intimacy with things and places.
As a professional figure drawing model, I am seen in a different way. This is a different way than in other places in my world been – as subject, object. I have found that while being an object, I was also seeing and creating, the seen becoming the seeing.
Who Is Artist Kate Sciandra?
- Photographer
- Painter
- Figure Drawing Model
- Lighting Designer
- Costume Designer
- Dancer
- Jeweler
- Business Owner
- Integrative Health Care Practitioner
- Published Author
- Business and Personal Coach and Consultant
- Adult Educator
Artist’s Statement
One thing that unifies all my work is the theme of deeply seeing, being seen, and the intimacy that results. During the countless hours spent as a figure model, being an object for others to find aesthetically and artistically useful, I became obsessed with capturing the compositions that would reveal themselves to me while I worked. I began to have a fascination with what it means to be seen and to simultaneously be the seer, like an optical illusion where from one side, the object becomes the viewer and then with a shift of the eye, flips back again.
Having both the regular experience of my body being the subject, and having worked in the healing profession with the bodies of others as my subject for over 20 years, I have a deep understanding of the body as something both intimate and abstract. This pairing has translated and evolved into a way that I perceive, and then reflect the world at large. Creating a balance of universality and specificity, I work to capture objects, places, and people in ways that penetrate their nature, while also creating an image that has an aesthetic distance, sometimes reaching into the abstract. This generates a tension that is compelling for the viewer, drawing them into an even deeper relationship with the subject and the work itself.
