Kate Sciandra

From Buffalo, NY

Lives & Works in Minneapolis, MN

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Obsessed with seeing, yearning for connection, passionate about sharing voice and vision, art is my food, my balm, my drug of choice.

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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.

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We are in a world that is flooded with images, but 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, 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 that I am 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.

 

As a dance lighting designer, I watched bodies in space, sculpting with light to emphasize the story their shapes and movements told through gestures subtle and gross. My long history as an instructor and provider of hands-on body therapy gave me a relationship with "seeing" other bodies, often in close and specific ways. 

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My body, the bodies of others, intimacy, abstraction and objectification all come together in the way I capture images of the body. I engage with bodies as objects of beauty, abstract shapes, bringing out the aspects that I find most intriguing. Even as I become very intimate with them, I allow – even encourage – them to be disconnected from their personae, stirring feelings from tender, to erotic, to discomforting in the viewer.

As a woman living in the United States within the current social and political environment, claiming my own body, it’s use, and issues of consent, and the uses and consent of others, is something I can do to contribute to an important conversation in the larger community, as well as fueling my own interests.