bio:
Stacey Stormes is an interdisciplinary artist and arts-educator. Creating visual metaphor in a variety of mediums including lens based, new media, and installation, she enjoys work that simultaneously seduces and repels. Her work explores body, consciousness, and connection to environment. She holds a BFA from the University of South Florida and a MFA from Columbia College Chicago. She is full-time art faculty at the Community College of Aurora, in Colorado and splits her time between Denver area and Tampa Bay, Florida. Her current research obsessions are arts of resistance and the mediated body (works that fuse body and new media arts).
statement:
I’m captivated by solid visual metaphor, drawn to those images that waver between pulling the viewer close and pushing them away, entranced by what happens to a performance grounded in the body once translated to the virtual, beguiled by precise mistakes. These are the contradictions that frame my work.
Much of my imagery is about psyche overwhelming physical, embodiment of desires and anxieties, and about trying to find balance and grounding in our bodies. I explore intersections between motherhood and working artist, consumption’s effects on the environment, and identity as a shifting collaborative construct.
In my processes I create Fluxus-like structures and formal frameworks that I perform as process-scores. These oddly satisfying elements of play (like inserting quick edits solely in increments of prime numbers) are integral to the process and final result even if imperceptible. I enjoy creating pristine footage, really trashing it in precisely controlled ways, exploring how mediation through video and web translate presence, struggling with embodiment in the digital trace, finding intersections between performance to the camera and performance in the edit.
I find comfort in the details. I ask my viewers to slow down and be present, notice the little things, and allow space to be imperfect and vulnerable. Just breathe.