Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sandrine Schaefer. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Sandrine thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career.
For those forging creative paths, transparency around what life might be like after school is essential. When I was an art student, I had a narrow and naïve view of how artists support themselves. While it was important for me to focus on developing my artwork, I wish that there had been more of an emphasis on building alternative support systems for life after school. It is essential that this kind of material is built into the curriculum of art programs and needs to address artists who make work that cannot easily fit into an art market. Now that I teach, I incorporate strategies that provide examples of what a sustainable creative life could look like. I ask students to interview people in creative fields and share their findings with the class. I also use play to address professional practices in the classroom. For example, we engage in future envisioning exercises where we collectively brainstorm practical ways we might support ourselves as artists.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I am an interdisciplinary artist who primarily works in performance art and interactive installation. Positioning the live encounter as primary and using a site-sensitive approach, my artworks are social and collaborative. My performances challenge conventional viewing tendencies by using repetition, long duration, and strategies that reward curious viewers with multisensory elements. My most current work explores everyday encounters in urban wilds between humans and other-than-human animals considered “nuisance species”. Celebrating our interspecies entanglements, I create art experiences that reimagine ways for humans to be in relationship with their surrounding other-than-human worlds. I believe it is an artist’s responsibility to uplift the work of others. To bring this belief into action, my work extends into arts organizing, independent curation, writing and teaching. I have co-founded several artist-run initiatives and my writing on contemporary time-based art has been included in international print and online publications. I have been teaching art at the university level since 2012, offering courses in performance art, socially-engaged approaches, interdisciplinary art, sculpture, installation, professional practices, and artistic research methods. I am an Assistant Professor of Visual Art in 3D and Expanded Practices at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC.
My artwork has been exhibited internationally in galleries, museums, performance art festivals, and non-art designated spaces. I have shown work at the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Kunstgarasjen in Bergen, Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery in Chicago, VIVA! Art Action in Montreal, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and more. I have received awards through the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Tanne Foundation, the ICA Foster Prize, the Boston Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center. I also serve on the Artist Advisory Council at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
Creative expression opens possibilities for connections that are not accessible elsewhere in life. Spending so much of my life in a creative state offers respite from places in society that often feel oppressive. Art creates opportunities to reimagine the worlds we live in to reflect what we value most about our lives. I engage in this when I am making art, but also when I am working with other artists and teaching. Building a container where others can practice their own creative thinking and expression while witnessing others do the same is incredibly fulfilling.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
Like many artists, I came to art through painting. In the late 90’s I moved to Boston from Baltimore to attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Being immersed in the art scene in Boston taught me that painting isn’t limited to the stuff that comes in a tube. An artist can paint with sound, action, time and space. Exposure to a robust art community that supported experimental and experiential approaches dismantled everything I had come to understand about art. The thing we call “art” can be an experience rather than an object! This was confusing, but also endlessly fascinating and liberating. That was when I shifted away from object making to experience making.
Not long after I started making performance art and interactive installation, I came to learn the term “site-specific”. This was a term that felt appropriate to my approach, but the more I used it as a descriptor, the more I felt something was missing. I now use the term “site-sensitive” because it conjures action. To be sensitive means to sense [to feel, touch, smell, listen, see, etc. If a work is site-sensitive it is always site-specific, but a site-specific piece is not always site-sensitive. To be site-sensitive, a piece must be intentional about incorporating all aspects of the present identity of a place while exercising foresight into what that place might become in the future. Site-sensitive art also considers the history of a place. It considers the chance element of working in real time. It actively engages things like the temperature of a room, the bodies gathered in it, dust on the wall, a spider crawling on the floor, the sounds that permeate from nearby situations. In other words, to be site-sensitive means to be in a constant state of encountering a space, rather than placing something in a space that only considers a particular moment of the space’s identity.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.SandrineSchaefer.com
- Instagram: @abandonedtires
Image Credits
01. Sandrine Schaefer + Jeremy Brooks, “Wade,” 2023, photo by Daniel S. DeLuca, 02. Sandrine Schaefer “Pace Investigations No. 6,” 2017-2018, photo by Daniel S. DeLuca 03. Sandrine Schaefer “Pace Investigations No. 4,” 2016, photo by Daniel S. DeLuca 04. Sandrine Schaefer “Gestures of Greeting (terrestrial),” 2022, photo by Bre McNamara 05. Sandrine Schaefer “Wandering With the Horizon,” 2015, photo by Nisa Ojalvo 06. Sandrine Schaefer “gaggle walk no. 1,” 2019, photo by Daniel S. DeLuca 07. Sandrine Schaefer “Under Flame,” 2012, photo by Daniel S. DeLuca