Please note: the artist has cancelled her visit and talk.
Theresa Ganz (IG: @tganz) makes landscapes and interiors in the form of collage, video, and installation. Her work blends a 19th-century Romantic vision of the individual in nature with a 21st-century lived experience mediated by screens. While her primary medium is photography, a singular, still image is almost never the final product. Cutting and pasting, whether as collage, digital stitching or video editing is central to her process. Ganz uses the referential and literal quality of the photograph to create an altered Reality.
In traditional Western art, landscape tends to suggest vastness and the conquering of “man” over nature, or conversely nature’s awesome greatness and the smallness of “man.” This sensibility, the sublime, was expressed in painting through an expansive outward vision, coded as masculine, in contrast to natural forms found decoration, rendered as surfaces and coded as feminine. One was divine, while the other worldly and base. Collaging photographic features of landscape, Ganz seeks to undermine these dispositions, offering a more myopic and ambiguous vision, never affording the viewer enough distance to gaze out, but confronting them with a maze-like and internal world of warped detail and impenetrable surfaces.
Ganz makes work that refers to the decorative but reaches for the sublime through sheer scale and queasy disorientation. From cut-out parts, she constructs architectural spaces and decorative motifs. Romanticism and later Transcendentalism promised spiritual experience through communion with nature. In a time of catastrophic environmental degradation, this seems unattainable, yet the impulse remains. In a digital, dematerialized world, do objects still have aura? Is it still meaningful to stand in a room with a work of art? These questions motivate and haunt Ganz’ work.
Theresa Ganz was born in New York City. She earned her B.A. from Vassar College in Film and her M.F.A. from San Francisco Art Institute in Photography. She works in photo-based collage, installation and video. Her work has shown nationally and internationally at Smack Mellon, The RISD Museum, The Datz Museum of Art in Korea, the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco, Evans Contemporary in Canada, The Bell Gallery at Brown University, San Francisco CameraWork and The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin and at various commercial spaces in New York and San Francisco.
Her work was included in the 2016 DeCordova Biennial. Her work has also been featured and reviewed in publications including ArtForum, Mousse Magazine, Outpost Journal and Magazine Gitz. Her work is in the collections of Providence College, the Chrysler Museum of Art, the RISD Museum and the New York Public Library. She was a founding member and director at Regina Rex in New York. She currently resides in Providence, RI where she is an Associate Professor of Visual Art at Brown University.
Her book “Shape Shifting” was published by the Penumbra Foundation, Summer 2019. Her first trade publication “Grand Illusion” will be published by Mousse Publishing in the Fall of 2023.
