Ballast/Break/Bricks

Ballast/Break

A different iteration of the installation used a shorter stack of bricks to enhance the visual perspective relationship between the sculptural and flat components of the piece. The ability to just barely see inside the stack emphasized the idea of being a figment of idea, imagination, or longing.

Lawndale Art Center exhibition, 2012

Ballast

Leaning towers of stacked bricks have been installed as part of numerous exhibitions about innovations in contemporary printmaking. Exhibition venues including the Janet Turner Print Museum, Belmont University’s Leu Center for the Visual Arts as part of the 2014 Nashville Print Revival, and Bromfield Gallery in Boston, MA, 2012 – 2014

Ballast Bricks

Drypoint-printed hollow bricks made of tracing paper were stacked on a shipping pallet.

From the A Thickening Rhythm catalog essay by Julie Poitras Santos:

Carrie Scanga uses intaglio printed and delicately folded tracing paper to create architectural building blocks of increase through repetitive labor. Each piece of paper is folded and shaped around a brick, which is later removed, creating thousands of ghost bricks reflecting the memory of weight and a process of making that includes loss. Scanga stacks these fragile bricks one on top of the other, layering them over time, the repeated gestures of printing, folding and stacking, quite literally thickening space. She builds towers and enclosures, creating a new architecture that reveals the structure of time and accretion, and question the ways we, as embodied beings, inhabit the world. In Ballast the bricks lie stacked on a pallet, awaiting their journey to use, a ghostly stack of multiple drawings in space. The bricks retain the marks of history. Their delicate paper forms heighten their momentary status and leave them open to transformation and gravity, to wander a bit, or sag, to shift in the air.

Coleman Burke Gallery, Brunswick, ME, 2012