Rebecca C. Strauss

Fine Arts Professional

For information about upcoming shows, events, documentation of works in progress, research, and art related activities, please visit instagram.com/rebeccacstrauss/.

This is it! Your last chance to see Wander at the Mildred I. Washington Gallery @dccvisualarts It’s been an honor to have my work shown with 5 other amazing artists. Soon I’ll have these pieces back in my hands, but a few MAY be scheduled

It’s the final week of Wander at the Mildred I. Washington Gallery at DCC in Poughkeepsie, NY. @dccvisualarts Stop in to see the work of 6 amazing artists who feature the natural world in their work. This is “Rooted Vessel (Vacancies),&rd

Thank you to @clotheorie for the gorgeous install shots of my work in Wander, a group exhibition on view at the Mildred I. Washington Art Gallery @dccvisualarts through May 12th. Pictured here is “Rooted Vessel (World’s End),” the m

So of course, after looking everywhere I could think to with no success, I got home last night after the market and there, on the couch, under my knitting bag, was the box of 🪬 pendants. So, if you had wanted one send me a message! I have these and

I am intimately connected to my art. Each body of work responds to a question or need prompted by my lived experience. A focus on tactility, physicality, material, and process is constant across everything I create. I engage deeply with all my chosen media, satiating a desire to touch and be touched, hold and be held, becoming fully immersed and present as I sculpt, weave, fabricate, dissect, and manipulate. Ceramic, wood, fiber, and metal intertwine with electronics and digital fabrication, functioning as experiential facilitators and tools for production. I crave a comprehensive understanding of materials and processes to expand and adapt their possibilities to best serve my purposes. I collect natural objects as inspiration and take extreme pleasure in finding exquisite beauty in the small and the happenstance: the utterly delicate patterning of a clementine membrane; the sloping planes of a scapula; the natural shelter of a seedpod. My continuing research of these technical and philosophical trajectories serves as the foundation of my studio practice.

This interdependence is illustrated by one of my ongoing series, Rooted Vessels. Rooted Vessels explores the foundational role of the embrace in our human experience. The circumstances of daily life often leave us without sufficient physical contact with other people. We alleviate that lack in a variety of ways; cuddling, exercise, physical contact of any variety, and sublimation into imagination or fantasy. I often find myself seeking voids and hollows in nature and projecting myself mentally into the spaces. These sculptures are the products of those imaginings. Bodies contort and twist themselves into found locations, altering their physiology in pursuit of physical contact and comfort. 3D scanning and printing serve as a modern-day pantograph, accommodating the material properties inherent to ceramics, allowing sculpted forms to fit into found spaces with the intimacy and specificity of puzzle pieces. Rooted Vessels recently transitioned into the use of figuration, eschewing metaphor to place actual bodies into their chosen sites of refuge. Doing so has made explicit the physical and tactile desire that the series is grounded in.