In A Shimmer or Deluge

Sean M. Starowitz, MFA 2023, Sculpture

Rooted in artistic research-based practice, my work wrestles with fissures in the contemporary moment regarding ethical practices, the environment, and perception. My work directly engages media images and historical materials translated through drawing, sculpture, and moving image. Conceptual frameworks intersect with ideologies of extraction, economics, labor & leisure, and politics. The studio exists to imagine new alternatives and possibilities for our built and natural environments by producing regenerative art-making processes, sculptural works and drawings that challenge our current understanding of image-making, historical frameworks, and technology . It is essential that artists participate as ethical makers, mindful of material and consequence. How can speculative futures and play liberate us from the impending doom of climate collapse? As makers, can we model new socialist objects and technologies? These are the questions that drive the studio. Each project interprets the elusive temporal horizon - shifting between linear, geologic, and futurity-based realities of time - acting as a map to consider new constellations within the perception of nature and the environment. These studies do not result in the production of truth (or a truth) but rather become a series of field markers in a horizonless landscape of data, 24-hour new cycles, and endless scrolling