SHERRY KARVER

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Sherry Karver is not a traditional photographer. She is constantly looking for new and innovative approaches to the medium, and pushes the parameters of both photography and painting by combining them with narrative text, and most recently with jigsaw puzzle pieces made from her own photos.

Sherry was born and raised in Chicago, and now lives in California with her poet/novelist husband Jerry Ratch. Her background is actually as a ceramic sculptor and she received her MFA in ceramics from Tulane University in New Orleans. She taught college level ceramics for many years while her own work evolved into the photo-based mixed media she now does.

Sherry's work is represented by several galleries and she has had over 25 solo exhibitions. Her work is in over 185 private, corporate, and museum collections around the country.

Pushing traditional boundaries of oil painting, photography, and text, I have combined them to create a unique hybrid that confronts individual and societal issues so rampant in today's culture: alienation, loneliness, loss of identity, the passage of time, memory, self-image, and how we view others.

These mixed media, photo-based works originate from photographs I have taken on city streets in New York, Paris, Milan, etc. and in iconic buildings such as Grand Central Terminal in NY.

Writing text over some of the figures in my photos is a way to personalize individuals, and make them stand out from the crowd since we each have a unique story to tell. These brief narratives are from my imagination, based solely on one's appearance or stance. By using text in my work, it adds another layer, and gives the viewer a chance to “experience” the artwork, and relate to the characters, becoming part of the process by reading it.

I superimpose these ”biographies” on top of the individuals, almost as if they are wearing their stories like an article of clothing. I give a little bit of fictional history about the person; where they are from, their age, what they do, their hopes, their dreams and aspirations, and often something embarrassing or personal that they would rather not have revealed. The figures are often caught in movement, conveying our individual journeys, where we are all "collectively alone".

I often incorporate ‘ghost-like apparitions’ that fade out in the background. These figures represent the passage of time – all the people that have been in the exact same place but at a different moment – maybe only five minutes before, or ten years in the future. We are all connected in this time continuum, even if we aren’t aware of it. My work embraces the contemporary non-linear view of time with its randomness, spontaneity, and chance occurrences.

These are one-of-a-kind works on wood panels, (not photo editions), and all of the color is hand-painted with oil glazes. The final surface has a glossy UV resin coating.

Photography is the first step in my mixed media process. I am pushing the parameters of photography by having jigsaw puzzles created from my own photographs, and combining them with oil paint, occasional text, and glossy resin surface on wood panels.

People are often searching for things they have missed in life, especially since Covid19. We have missed opportunities, missed seeing family and friends, traveling, eating in restaurants, etc. It has been a universal missing of things that were familiar and ordinary that we once took for granted.

I leave out some sections of the puzzle when putting them together, and paint the negative spaces with oils. The left out spaces represent our search for the missing pieces in our lives, or in the world, and the realization that not everything can be found and replaced.

This series is about finding the acceptance in what is not there, and the hopefulness that the missing pieces could be space for something new to enter the picture.