Stacia Yeapanis: The Thin Line Between One Thing and Another
Exhibit Dates: January 16 to February 15, 2020
Please join us for an opening reception: Thursday, January 16, 7:00 – 8:30 p.m.
Artist talk beginning at 7:20 p.m.
The artist Stacia Yeapanis
HANCOCK, MI Finlandia University Gallery will present an exhibit of mixed media sculptures by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, educator and writer Stacia Yeapanis. The exhibit titled The Thin Line Between One Thing and Another will be on display at the Finlandia University Gallery, located in the Finnish American Heritage Center (FAHC), Hancock from January 16 to February 15, 2020.
An opening reception for the artist will take place at the gallery, Thursday, January 16th, from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. with an artist talk beginning at 7:20 p.m. The reception is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
Stacia Yeapanis work conflates art practice with meditation practice, devotion and contemplation. She brings the value of process, not product, to the forefront in this exhibition of objects that embody the adage the finger pointing at the moon.
Her textile-like sculptures, which consist of discarded toilet paper tubes, hand-knotted embroidery floss and empty space, use a formal visual vocabulary as metaphor for consciousness and inquiry. In our contemporary speed-driven, profit-focused world, Yeapanis uses the act of tying knots as a way to get intimate with the present moment, and she invites viewers to use the act of looking to that same end.
“My haptic meditation and the viewer’s contemplation of the results are intimately connected, notes Yeapanis.”Both are sensory experiences of repetition that can transform anxiety about impermanence, uncertainty and imperfection into curiosity about the mystery of what’s actually here in the present moment…”
Informed by her longing for stillness as well as her compulsion towards action, Yeapanis uses repeated marks and gestural forms to illuminate the complexity of being human. “The ultimate paradox of contemporary American life is embodied in everything I make: we keep trying to relax by staying busy,”says Yeapanis. “My work self-consciously echoes the anxiety of constant doing, while offering a remedy for this pervasive busyness: the value of extreme slowness. I seek to provide breathing room by enticing viewers to look closely.”
Yeapanis received a BA from Oberlin College and a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Arts from the Fiber and Material Studies Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
She has held several solo exhibits including a solo show at Kent State University, the Indianapolis Art Center and many galleries and art centers throughout the Midwest. She is in the collection of the J.G. Wentworth Collection in New York, NY and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, IL.
In 2019 she received an Individual Artist Grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. She has been recognized with several grants from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, including a DCASE Individual Artist Grant and a Community Arts Assistance Program award.
Stacia Yeapanis: The Thin Line Between One Thing and Another will be on display at the Finlandia University Gallery through February 15, 2020.
The Finlandia University Gallery is located in the Finnish American Heritage Center, 435 Quincy Street, Hancock. Gallery hours are Monday to Friday 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. or by appointment. Please call 906-487-7500 for more information.
