Lives and works in Miami, Florida.
Lima, Perú, 1968

 

          STUDIES
1992 Computer Applications. Massachusetts College of Arts, Boston.

1989 Graphic Design. Toulouse Lautrec Institute, Lima.

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         EXHIBITIONS
2023 Reeves House Visual Arts Center, "Off the Wall". Woodstock, GA.

          Folds, Imago Art in Action Solo Show, South Miami, FL.
2021 MARJCC 2021 International Women’s Day Exhibition. 
         Michael-Ann Russell Jewish Community Center. Aventura, FL.
         ArtFields Collective. Lake City, SC.

2019 Apafa Leon Pinelo, Lima. “Arte en Pelota”.

2018 Pinta Miami, Miami.

         Galería John Harriman, Lima. Make a Wish Foundation, “Deseos Reflejados”.          National Association of Women Artists, INC. New York. Small Works Summer Exhibition.

          Wizo Miami. “A Brighter World”.

2017 Spectrum Miami, Miami.

I understand my works as "rhizomatic moments". The concept of rhizome studies the unexpected behavior in some organic bodies. Although my practice is based on the repetition of modules, my pieces grow, like rhizomes, without a beginning or an end, without a specific center, in random ramifications that, in a way, foreshadow the oppositions and contrasts that occur in reality. That is why they oppose the firm and the flexible, the static and the transformable, and the polished and the handcrafted. In some way, they reflect contemporary realities that can only be explained from fluctuation, mobility, or multiplicity, such as the chaotic diffusion of information, the flow of ideas in our own mental processes, political-social developments or migratory movements. Connections play a fundamental part of the conceptual development of my work and are emphasized through lines that cross segments, or with threads that tie different planes. 

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Sandra Szkolnik's artistic practice was unleashed by the enchantment that origami and folded paper produced in her. Considering the specificities of these modalities, it is not the geometry that draws attention in the first instance. It is the magic of the folds, in their infinity and reversibility, that marvels. Geometry appears here almost as a by-product, arisen by contrasting exact proportions of paper. But this by-product is also a kind of discovery, as if the paper revealed an invisible matrix that permeates everything that exists. 

The intuition that geometry can be an infinite and underlying matrix, alive, and linked to the nature of what is in the world, prompted the artist's subsequent inquiries. The notion of rhizome, taken from Gilles Deleuze, gives her the conceptual tools to develop pieces in which formal breaks are gradually introduced indicating an anti-order, a freedom more linked to the instinctual than to the rational. For this reason, although her language is based on a concatenation of triangular segments, her work appears increasingly breaking the geometric order. Szkolnik's work is transformable because it alludes to a living development, to a “rhizomatic moment”, as she has so clearly expressed it: an instant in the infinity of a becoming that has no beginning or end and whose rules cannot be entirely conjugated. Cascades and loops were the first forms of this break, which later incorporated disproportions and imbalances. The inclusion of the handcrafted, with threads that cross or seem to hold their structures, calls for precariousness as the antithesis of the resoundingly positive.

Szkolnik's proposal is deeply contemporary. She takes up geometry from a hybrid perspective that leaves aside concerns about the autonomy of form and the merely aesthetic aspects of the work. Her pieces critically glide over the parameters of perfection, and insert narratives that escape rational absolutism to make room for memorable, playful and subjective forms of creation.


Katherine Chacón

Critic and Art Curator