Vanessa Snyder
Artist Statement:
The focus of my work has always been aligned with two things: my affinity for
history and interest in the sciences. I trust both to inform me with the data I need to
translate the world in which I find myself as a living and adapting human being. As an artist, my quest is to seek a fuller understanding of my place in the world and then to interpret my conclusions. I use my aesthetic sensibilities and voice, infused with beauty and respect to produce my conclusions as artwork.
Perhaps this broad spectrum of history and science has proven monumentally
too large to grasp for me because it necessitates outward observations (toward the global imagery of landscapes, cultures and atmosphere), as well as inward
observations (microscopic explorations on a cellular level of our human psyche and
botanical delights). I have vacillated between subject matters in a dizzying search as a glutton might at the feast that is our planet.
Digging through historical photographs and documentation provides profound amounts of information about human behaviors, which I find just as interesting as what evolution has to teach us about our animal behaviors. My future aesthetic adventures include an acceptance of the inevitable end of life as critical to an appreciation of the joys of life, just as beauty requires the lack of beauty to exist.
Travelling the planet to experience other cultures, geographies, animals and plant life is my personal goal, and my preferred media for documentation and translation are photography and paintings of what I can absorb.
I find beauty in the largeness of universal behaviors such as procreation,
propagation, and adaptation, as well as in the tiniest details of stems and eyes and
seeds. Invisible subjects and theories are particularly appealing because they nudge my imagination to interpret what is not plainly visible. So large a planet, so little time!