amy schissel
Schissel's 2020 solo Armory Show project "articulates what is a growing concern about the disappearing boundaries between real life and the internet. What we experience online and in daily life is not always what it appears, and the flow of information between a viewer and the web can be disrupted by any given variables as we see in ongoing discussions regarding truth and social media. Through extracting mapping data and geopolitical relationships, Amy Schissel offers new ways of considering the physical world and its numeral representation online" -Jamillah James, curator at ICA LA, program audio guide for 'FOCUS' platform, THE ARMORY SHOW, 2020.
Amy Schissel is a Canadian artist, presently based in Miami FL. She obtained her BFA and MFA (2009) from the University of Ottawa and has been awarded a 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Residency and a 2017 Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture Award. In 2013 she received Ottawa’s Royal Bank of Canada Emerging Artist Award and in 2011 was a finalist in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition and National Exhibition, touring the Art Gallery of Alberta, the Hamilton Art Gallery, and Toronto’s Power Plant. Schissel was also Canada’s 2009 recipient of the Brucebo Foundation Fine Arts Award and Residency in Visby, Sweden.
Recent national and international exhibitions include a solo project in the NYC ARMORY SHOW's curated 'FOCUS' section (Jamillah James, curator ICA, LA) with Patrick Mikhail Gallery, A solo exhibition at VISARTS Center, MD, VOLTA Basel, Switzerland, VOLTA NY, NYC, Fine Art Museum at West Virginia University, WV, Huntington Museum of Art, WV, Florida State Museum of Fine Arts, FL, Northern Illinois University Museum of Art, IL, Spartanburg Art Museum, Clay Centre for the Arts and Science's Juliet Museum, WV, Pittsburgh Centre for the Arts, PA, Manifest Creative Research Centre, OH, Perdue University's Fountain Gallery, Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa, ON, and Patrick Mikhail Galleries in Montreal and Ottawa.
Ms. Schissel has lectured across the country and internationally in Halifax, Toronto, Ottawa, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Pittsburgh. Collections include Google, Royal Bank of Canada, West Virginia University Museum of Fine Art, Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the New Zealand Consulate, University of Brussels, Gotland Museum of Fine Art, the City of Ottawa, and Canada’s Council for the Arts Art Bank. Schissel has received Grants and Awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (Painters and Sculptors Grant), Canada Council of the Arts, City of Ottawa, Ontario Arts Council, West Virginia University, University of Miami, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is represented by PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY in Montreal QC, Canada
As the 19th century gave us radical new ways to experience and move through space with the plane, train, and automobile, Amy Schissel's work addresses our present, even more radically different, experience of space driven by the multifaceted virtual worlds of the internet’s network spaces. Her drawings, paintings and installations are infused with information friction and subscribe to modes of representation of new virtual spaces and special effects to build architectures of fictional space. Notational devices drawn from digital architecture, interaction design, and digital mapping schemata clash with exploding vectors, imploding pathways, and webs of connectivity. A walk through of her exhibitions intend to bring a spacial and bodily awareness of the many interfaces/gateways to the CLOUD’s invisible networks, intersections and connectivity infusing the everydayness of our environments connecting us across physical boundaries. She aims for the viewer to experience layered cartographies melding disparate worlds, whose multifaceted surfaces echo one’s intuitive movement and interaction in an ultra dynamic hyper-world.