Carla Fisher Schwartz

Instagram: @carla_f_S

Website: http://www.carlafisherschwartz.com

Bio: Carla Fisher Schwartz is a visual artist and educator based in Oakland, CA. Her studio practice investigates the relationship between the mapped image and contemporary notions of exploration, virtuality, and the simulated environment through print media, sculpture and video installation. Her art has been exhibited at venues including the Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago, IL), the Contemporary Print Media Research Center at UC Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA), and Gallery 263 (Cambridge, MA). Recent residencies include Stove Works (Chattanooga, TN), Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (Nebraska City, NE) and Terrain Residency (Springfield, IL). Fisher Schwartz received her MFA in Visual Arts from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was awarded the Bell Cramer Award in Printmaking, and her BA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is an Assistant Professor of Pictorial Art specializing in Digital and Hybrid Processes in the Department of Art and Art History at San José State University.

Statement: "My practice investigates the conceptual implications of the digital landscape, specifically, how virtual environments frame our experience of the physical world. I am particularly interested in moments when these technological representations falter or reveal their constructed nature, such as glitches in Google Street View, lost texture files from video games, or invented geographies embedded in satellite maps. Through print media, sculptural objects and installation, I raise questions about the virtual experience of the world, exposing not only the technological frameworks that generate these representations, but also the human desires and limitations that underlie them. Working with a combination of traditional and digital image-making methods, my work frequently translates fragments of digital environments into material form. The act of physically rendering digital artifacts - whether as printed installations, paper sculptures or layered works on paper - underscores both the fragility of digital space and its persistent influence on how we perceive and imagine the landscape. A current project engages with the practice of “texture archaeology”: the obsessive search for source images and digital assets used to build game environments and other 3D-modeled worlds. My recent installation, cobble_stone.png, draws from a missing image file of a cobblestone texture widely used in 1990s video games and later pursued in a lengthy online hunt. By materially interpreting these digital fragments, the project reflects on our collective impulse to decode and reconstruct digital memory. "