Susan Scafati

https://www.susanscafati.net/ // @susanscafati

Susan Scafati is an American conceptual artist based in Austin, TX who explores how individual versus collective identities and personal versus cultural mythologies are constructed. She explores the iconography and materiality that contribute to the way meaning is organized and its impact on human experience. Scafati’s art plays with changing light refractions as a metaphor for “cultural lag”, a term which focuses on the lag between material culture — the technology, the infrastructure, the physical things— and immaterial culture — the rituals, the rules, the institutions.

Scafati makes installations, sculptures, and photo-based works. She is known for large-scale art installations, and her artwork has been exhibited in museums and galleries. Major commissions include a 111-foot installation featured at the Texas Cultural Trust’s Texas Medal of Arts Awards; a 4-story installation featured at the Facebook ofce; and a 2-story installation in the Austin Central Library windows.

Exhibitions include Unframed First Look at Sean Kelly Gallery, NY (curated by Cindy Sherman, Adam Fuss, and Jack Pierce); The Photo Review at Sol Mednick Gallery, PA (curated by Museum of Modern Art/MOMA Curator Sarah Meister); t e x t s c a p e at Co-Lab Projects’ DEMO Gallery; Goya: Mad Reason at The Blanton Museum of Art (curated by Douglas Cushing); and (with Lakes Were Rivers) in Strange Pilgrims at The Contemporary Austin (curated by Heather Pesanti); and Contemporary Photographic Practice and the Archive at the Harry Ransom Center.