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Early on, Szkolnik was inspired by origami, but her interests were not directed at the construction of figures—as in the traditional Japanese technique—but to the behavior of the regular modules that are progressively created by folding.
Within this apparently simple—but certainly infinite—focus of exploration, the artist traced the routes of what would be the visual formulations of her creative practice. In this, research on materials has been fundamental. The triangular modules, the basis of her language, needed to acquire not only physical consistency but also to adequately express the artist’s studied chromaticism. In addition, the flexibility of folds had to be manifested.
Additionally, Szkolnik’s work updates the tensions established by flat and three-dimensional modular developments, as we see in her Folds, but also in her Unfolds, or in pieces such as Folded Connections, where the volume is barely tangible.
Szkolnik also incorporates a haptic game between real and suggested possibilities of the viewer’s intervention. Although her first pieces were made so that spectators could arrange them “in their own way” using magnets on a flat surface—a device that is still used in her small-format production—, the artist has regulated this intervention in her later work, establishing tensions between the invitation to be manipulated generated by the folded forms and the real possibilities of manipulation.
Szkolnik actualizes in her work a deep interest in constructing a grammar of space, in which volumetric and flat, visible and invisible, expanded and folded, multiplied and divided forms, would make up the signs to be interpreted.
In these reflections, the artist has incorporated the study of rhizomatic developments proposed by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Her pieces are, in her words, “rhizomatic moments” in which there is neither a linear growth nor a center, but a tree-like and multiple progress that, in some way, relates them to the psychological, social and cultural realities of the contemporaneity.
Katherine Chacón
Lima, Perú, 1968.
EDUCATION/EDUCACIÓN
Graphic Design/Diseño gráfico
Instituto Toulouse Lautrec (Lima, 1986-1989).
Computer Applications/Aplicaciones informáticas.
Massachusetts College of Arts (Boston, MA, 1991-1992).
SELECTED GROUP SHOWS/SELECCIÓN DE EXPOSICIONES COLECTIVAS
Off the Wall. Reeves House Visual Art Center (Woodstock, GA, 2023).
ArtFields. ArtFields Collective (Lake City, SC, 2021).
MARJCC 2021 International Women’s Day Exhibition. Michael-Ann Russell Jewish Community Center (Aventura, FL, 2021).
Arte en Pelota. Apafa León Pinelo (Lima, 2019).
A Brighter World. Women’s International Zionist Organization (Wizo) (Miami, FL, 2018).
Small Works Exhibition. National Association of Women Artists, INC. (New York, NY, 2018).
Deseos Reflejados. Galería John Harriman/Make a Wish Foundation (Lima, 2018).
Pinta Miami (Miami, FL, 2018).
Spectrum Miami (Miami, FL, 2017).