Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else, and thinking something different  Albert Szent-Gyorgy

Suzan Shutan is a multimedia artist, Sculpture teacher at Housatonic Community College. Connecticut, USA and Advisor to Master’s candidates at the Transart Institute, Danube University in Krems, Austria.

Interested in probing different artistic disciplines, her work is based on resignifying space and establishing a permanent dialogue between bidimension and tridimension, as well as transforming and playing with the materiality of the elements with which she builds her work.

During her production residency at ´ace, she became interested in investigating the landscape and emblematic places of Argentina, and later made an installation in the Polyglot Hall.

ARTIST STATEMENT

What I look for in my work is to illustrate an idea using its intended form as a springboard, creating believable though not necessarily real forms. I wish to evoke the essence of an object, remaking the known into something uncommon and transformative. I think about the ability of an image to sustain itself throughout time, to excite-provoke and feel new. By creating universals, common issues or denominators, I hope to invoke communication to a broad spectrum of people who then, make the ideas their own. Being 5 foot tall, it is not easy to create large works. You have to climb up and down ladders just to take a look at what you are making, but the idea of making an artwork that you can “walk into” in which all the variable parts add up to the whole, is just so exciting.

Installing an idea in a space,

I try to consider the architecture as an integral part of the work.
Each section or piece contributes to the whole with the work dialoguing from wall to wall and space to space. Think of a book with all its chapters and then walk into my installation considering each section as part of a larger story in which one gets drawn into an illusion through an array of visual effects.

I work between dimensions, as an investigation into perception and optics. I loved the illusional play on shape (circle as a hole) and space in Bugs Bunny cartoons where Elmer Fudd would chase Bugs into a hole in the ground, getting rid of the hole by taking it with him. Line is the obvious “hole” to work with because it can be rendered flat, given shape, depth or literally extended into space. For the most part, my work is concept driven and has always embraced “semiotics”, using form as sign, symbol or communicative behavior. Sometimes it represents universal laws on the natural world, and may show systems of life processes as subjective universes. I have worked in video for twenty-five years but just recently have begun to integrate it into my installations. What I find so appealing about this medium is that it is all encompassing. It is concept driven, time based, sensory and completes my static work. Its ability to be fluid yet manipulated is similar to my working process. I can alter the intuitive way information is recalled or processed, and can manipulate sequences and operations that will change an association or visual perception, just like I can visually change the outcome of a form.