FLUX: Signe Stuart

Flux alludes to natural and manmade networks from rivers, neural pathways and quantum fields to systems of transportation and communications, everything interconnected and in flux. My visual vocabulary emphasizes line: single lines emerging from material; low relief line patterns forming flux fields and networks of relationships. Recent cut paper works, drawing/sculpture hybrids, generally consist of 2 or more overlapping panels hung away from the wall to create shadows. The cut paper works have evolved into achromatic works, unintentionally referencing the unified field theory of everything. Light is an auxiliary medium, creating subtle and changing thresholds between the visible and invisible.

— Signe Stuart

About the artist

Beginning in the early 1960s, Signe Stuart’s professional career has now spanned more than sixty-five years.  Her approach to art making has always relied on experimentation and rule breaking. Using the materials and form of painting, she breaks away from the standard rectangle and concepts of framing. For the artist, a sheet of paper is a metaphorical slice of time and space, a context in which to construct ideas about the connections and intersections of consciousness with matter and energy.

Stuart has been in at nearly thirty solo museum exhibits including such venues as the South Dakota Art Museum (where a career retrospective is planned for later 2023-24), the Roswell Museum and Art Center (Roswell NM), the Sheldon Art Museum (Lincoln, NE), the North Dakota Museum of Art (Grand Forks, ND) the American Swedish Museum (Minneapolis, MN), the Nordic Heritage Museum (Seattle, WA), Northern Arizona University Art Museum (Flagstaff, AZ), the Plains Art Museum (Fargo, ND), the Sioux City Art Center (Sioux City Iowa), and the Montgomery Museum of Art (Montgomery, AL), among others. One of Stuart’s 60-foot-wide abstract narrative scroll paintings, Onomatopoeia, was the subject of a musical piece by composer Jonathan Chenette which premiered with a performance at the Albuquerque Art Museum in 29010 in conjunction with the exhibition, Crossing Boundaries: Synesthesia in American Art.

 Stuart has received numerous awards including an NEA Painting Fellowship, 2 NEA mural commissions, a South Dakota Arts Council Artists Fellowship and a New Mexico Experimental Glass workshop Fellowship.

Additional resources

• Signe Stuart – official website

Media Coverage

• ArtNews
• Pasatimepo
• Cassilhaus
• Southwest Contemporary
• Artist in Residence
• wikipedia Page