Biography

b. 1978, Augusta, GA

Amy Sacksteder is an artist and curator whose work explores personal and collective relationships to landscape and artifact. She works across media, most commonly in painting, collage, drawing, cut paper, installation, and ceramics. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, most recently at Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY); Buckham Gallery (Flint, MI); IBIS Contemporary Art Gallery (New Orleans, LA); BasBlue via Belle Isle Viewing Room (Detroit); and Contemporary Art Matters Gallery (Artsy and NY); and Divisible Projects (Dayton, OH).

In 2021, Sacksteder was invited to join the Long Island City Studio Collective in New York, where she maintains a selected inventory of artwork. Her work can also be viewed at Belle Isle Viewing Room in Detroit. She is now represented by IBIS Contemporary Art Gallery in New Orleans. Sacksteder lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, outside of Detroit. Sacksteder works from her studios in Ypsilanti and New York, and is a professor in the School of Art + Design at Eastern Michigan University.

Gallery

Artist's Statement

“My work explores artifacts as vehicles of human connectedness to specific places and occurrences. Compelled by interactions with the land and landscape, I investigate the personal, environmental, and political significances of place. I’m interested in idiosyncratic, ephemeral contrasts that draw my attention as I move through my daily life, often capturing these moments on my phone’s camera for later consideration. A personal investment in essential materials—tarnishing silver leaf, volcanic ash, glacial lagoon water, lily pollen—infuses and activates the work, such as may occur with the aura of a beloved souvenir.

Artifacts and images become a palette of elements from which to draw while working in the studio. In my working with them, their context is altered. They’re transmuted. Solid objects give way to plays of light and fractured foliage; high-chroma shapes interweave with vacancies and tactile or visual textures; physical and pictorial layering explores and exploits real and false shadows; the removal of solid shapes gives way to portals. The splicing of specific imagery and materials, and formal elements such as shape, line, and color, result in work that pivots on the cusp between realism and abstraction.”

-2021