Rebecca Stern

In her latest body of work, Closer, artist Rebecca Stern utilizes three visual elements to contend with a weighty conceptual task: the inexorable journey into one’s own psyche. Where she manipulates fabric into sculpted, three-dimensional forms, Stern places imagined realities–anxious futures–in contrast with tangible ones. Raw, bare canvas is the realm of the unknown, a source of excitement and terror for the person who dares to go there. Indeed, Stern dares. Through mark-making techniques ranging from pigment pools to brush strokes to cut and sewn swaths of painted canvas, Stern’s hand ventures into this unknown. Each work is a close study, a singular exploration, a repeated, iterative reflection of the mind’s deep work: to control, to adapt, to understand.