Katrin Schnabl
Chicago, IL
Katrin Schnabl practises across visual art, fashion, performance and installation, fusing movement, pattern and conceptual investigations.
Message
Katrin Schnabl is a multi-disciplinary artist, creative collaborator, and art educator working with installation, visual art, dance, and fashion. Her recent series Portal are dimensional mesh fabric sculptures that subtly but profoundly shift bodily relationships in space. Her installations include large size scrolls where the sheer tinted stitched fabric fields kaleidoscopically interact front and back, and hanging tapestries that fluidly hybridize the plane and space. Dynamically engaging the viewer to explore the body’s spatial awareness and activate the senses, the work is informed by design expertise and her dimensional pattern cutting which are put in service to capture movement and light.
Her work has been featured in New American Painting, and exhibited at Facility Chicago, PanAmerican Art Center, Devening Projects, Evanston Art Center, Highland Park Arts Center, 6018 North, and the DePaul Art Museum. Schnabl has collaborated on costumes and sets with acclaimed dance companies and choreographers San Francisco Ballet, Joffrey Ballet's Nicolas Blanc, Khecari, Maggio Danza Florence Italy, Trisha Brown Dance Company, Troika Ranch, Brendan Fernandes, Blondell Cummings, DD Dorvillier, Doug Elkins, John Jasperse, Jennifer Monson, Jody Oberfelder, Wendy Perron, Nejla Yatkin; an approach grounded in her training as a dancer, engaging with motion, sound, and energy to navigate space. She has worked under renowned fashion designers, including Jil Sander and Carolina Herrera, before launching an independent fashion label, Miche.Kimsa, and her eponymous line.
Statement
I work with sheer tinted mesh fabrics, stitching color fields into membranes that connect back unto themselves, then fold, to create both depth, and blending and refraction of colors, as a way of mixing paint. The technique of patterning and sewing to create these abstract paintings further allows me to scale the size in any direction, as well as expand dimensionally. In this way the canvasses have become deeper, their steel frames able to stand on their own, becoming portals. These portals do not have a top, bottom, front, or back, and invite the viewer to move around to experience a continuous shift in perception.
The experimentation has led me to the format of large scrolls. Suspended over a clear tube, the continuous membrane can be shifted slightly, which allows for numerous reconfigurations of the lines and fields within the installed piece.
The experience of the work may instill a drawing inside, a wish to step inside the art, which to me is phenomenal.
The latest installation, the triptych EWNS (an acronym for east west north south) forms a continuous circle, split open, and experienced in 3 40-foot portions. Conjuring maps and migratory patterns flowing over a spherical form, it is a meditation on the complimentary function of our bodies’ halves: a side for fielding circular inputs, and a side for cardinal directions. It is offering an embodied deliberation on what is embedded into many languages as the right and the left, the difference between the proper way, the law, and what is given less importance or significance. I am intrigued by mathematics, neuroscience, meta/ physics, and how the human body with all its senses is equipped as an extraordinary decoder of gross and subtle stimuli. Considering our neural attention to be actual currency, in real time, my pursuit is the creation of sensory amplifiers, ultimately to build scale space.