Stephanie Metz - Practice

Dedicated Meat Source

Stephanie Metz is an artist who explores the idea of seemingly opposing qualities coexisting within one object. Her sculpting material of choice is wool, which she compacts into nearly solid freestanding forms through a precise and laborious process known as needle felting.  The medium is crucial to the content: felted wool can appear both hard and soft, fragile and robust, natural and manmade. Felted wool is often viewed through the lens of its traditional and historical uses in the realms of domesticity, craft, and industry; in Stephanie’s hands it is loaded with potential for physical manipulation and conceptual redefinition.

Stephanie received her BFA from the University of Oregon and now lives and works in San Jose, California. She was a 2009 featured artist in “Bay Area Currents” at ProArts Gallery, Oakland, and has exhibited at Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. Her numerous group exhibitions include Creatures: From Bigfoot to the Yeti Crab at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Idaho, Formex Stockholm 2008, in Stockholm, Sweden, and Transmission:Experience at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore Gallery, Singapore. Metz was honored with two Center for Cultural Innovation Grants in 2011 and 2009. She has taught at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Tennessee.

PRACTICE

 Nave Gallery Annex

March 12 - April 5, 2014

reception: Wednesday March 12, 6-8 pm

artist talk: Friday March 21, 7 pm

story slam: Monday March 31, 7 pm

Click here and here to learn more about Practice.

I will be introducing each of the six invited artists of Practice over the next couple of weeks leading up to the opening on March 12. Click here and here to read about Caleb Cole and Zsuzsanna Szegedi.