Kerri Scharlin

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

Every human being constructs a world from the fragments encountered along the way. The world that an artist struggles to create, distilled from the vastness of possibilities, is what interests me more than any single work. For more than thirty years, my work has explored how identity can be discovered indirectly rather than declared outright. I’ve never been interested in self-expression as a singular voice so much as in the ways a self is assembled through relationships, influence, memory, and chance. My focus has never been on what the works depict but rather on what they model: the human act of constructing a world from accumulated experience. I began by collaborating with journalists, illustrators, courtroom sketch artists, police sketch artists, and even a Barbie coloring book illustrator, allowing others to construct portraits of me through their own systems of representation. More recently, that collaborative impulse has shifted into painting. In 2014 I started depicting women artists whose work I admired, imagining them as companions, influences, and mirrors through which I could think about my own artistic life. Over time the paintings have become increasingly abstract. Rather than describing individual artists, they examine how influence becomes form. My process relies on accumulation, repetition, collage, and self-imposed constraints. I gather fragments from my own archive, art history, digital images, previous paintings, and the work of others, allowing...

Artwork