Selected Recent Works
🏢♦️🔲🔸🔳🔷🔻🔺
Austin Central Library
Installation (Mixed Media)
2-stories
2019 (permanent acquisition)
Overlooking Austin’s skyline from the Library’s 3rd and 4th Floor windows, “🏢♦🔲🔸🔳🔷🔻🔺” reimagines our constructed landscape as a suspended spectrum of everyday urban forms in flux. "I’ve spent half my life living in urban spaces, seeing cities construct and destruct. This installation I created for the amazing Austin Central Library reimagines everyday building blocks as color fields in flux, an homage to the power of art in our lives.”
🌳 🏢 🔷 🔸 🔺
The Contemporary Austin
Archival Pigment Print
22 x 17 ½ inches
Edition of 80, with 7 AP
2019
Scafati was selected by the Contemporary Austin's Executive Director to be the 2019 Artist for the museum's Contemporary Print Series. Established in 1998, the Contemporary Print Series (formerly the Collectors’ Circle Print Program) highlights outstanding artists and encourages interest in contemporary art by commissioning a new print every year. Artists have included Deborah Roberts, Sterling Allen, Mark Mothersbaugh, and more.
t e x t s c a p e
Facebook office
Installation (Mixed Media)
4-stories
2017
A 4-story site-responsive installation was created for Facebook in conjunction with being selected to be an Artist-in-Residence. Susan’s installation from her body of work titled “ t e x t s c a p e “ is a meditation on constructed worlds, communication and connection through the gesture of text messaging. For this iteration, she invited the FB Austin community to co-create the work, resulting in phrases added to the textbox forms in 11 different languages. Watch this video to see how the interplay between the installation, diverse individuals and the cityscape invites viewers to think about the ways in which everyday forms influence individual and collective behavior.
Photo by Anna Mazurek.
t e x t s c a p e
(Exhibition with Sean Ripple)
Co-Lab Projects' DEMO Gallery
Mixed Media (Installations, sculptures, 10-foot boombox, performances, jumpsuit, street flyers, archival pigment prints)
Sizes varied
2017
"t e x t s c a p e" is a meditation on constructed worlds, communication, and connection through the gesture of text messaging. Susan Scafati creates a multitude of iterations of the ubiquitous smartphone textbox, extensively layering and enlarging its form from its familiar handheld 1-2 inch size to up to 10-feet. This play on scale shifts its physical relationship to the human form and suggests a metaphor for a greater psychological impact on human experience. Scafati’s artwork takes the form of large-scale high-grade mesh scrolls and archival pigment prints comprised of multi-layered cyanotypes and photograms; site-specific acrylic, wood, and marble installations; and textiles. Scafati commissioned the artist Sean Ripple to create an original interactive, performance-based works that engage some of the exhibition objects — activating their life beyond the gallery space and further drawing metaphors about public and private, presence and absence, and real and virtual.
if a 🌳 falls
Solo Exhibitions: Austin Central Library (TX); Bonsack Gallery (St. Louis, MO)
Installations, sculptures, archival pigment prints
2018-2019
In her solo exhibition titled "If a 🌳 falls..." American conceptual artist Susan Scafati explores existence and perception in the age of smartphones, inviting us to think about how representation of one’s self and one’s world is expressed within our visual, virtual culture today. Pigment prints from her "t e x t s c a p e" body-of-work are inspired by the smartphone speech bubble as an everyday icon that comprises our psychological landscape and influences human behavior. Scafati layers hand-drawn, hand-cut and projected textboxes made using sunprint, photogram and digital processes, creating multiple form and color iterations enlarged beyond their familiar handheld size. These works explore the relationship between digital filters and human perception. All works are titled in emojis.
t e x t s c a p e
Canopy Austin
Installation (Mixed Media)
Sizes varied
2016
"t e x t s c a p e" is a meditation on constructed worlds, communication, and connection through the gesture of text messaging.
The Contemporary Austin museum commissioned artist collective Lakes Were Rivers for their fall 2015 exhibition "Strange Pilgrims"curated by Heather Pesanti. The exhibition received a Critics' Pick (Artforum) and Best Museum Exhibition Award (Austin Critics' Table). Swan Cycle took the form of Chapter One
(an installation, pictured); Chapter Two (a video); and Chapter Three (a book).
Lakes Were Rivers (LWR), a collective formed in 2008, makes work informed by the theory and the practice of photography, exhibits work individually and collectively, and publishes limited-edition books. LWR has been featured in many exhibitions — including Strange Pilgrims (The Contemporary Austin), Contemporary Photographic Practice and the Archive (Harry Ransom Center), Artifact/Souvenir (Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum with Texas Biennial), and Panta Rei (Box 13 Artspace with FotoFest International Biennial). Members include Leigh Brodie, Elizabeth Chiles, Jessica Mallios, Mike Osborne, Jason Reed, Susan Scafati Shahan, Adam Schreiber, and Barry Stone.
Swan Cycle
Strange Pilgrim Exhibition
at The Contemporary Austin
Mixed Media Installation
Sizes Vary
2015
🏢🔳🔷♦️🔺🔶🔹
Texas Cultural Trust's Texas Medal of Arts Awards
Installation (Mixed Media)
111-feet
2019
As part of the Texas Cultural Trust's tenth biennial Texas Medal of Arts Awards celebration, American contemporary artist Susan Scafati was selected as the featured artist and commissioned to create a site-responsive 111-foot art installation titled “🏢🔳🔷♦️🔺🔶🔹.”
Photo by Colin Doyle.
