Sally Scopa

Lives and works in Bellingham, WA

Artist statement

In my work, paired images on antique stereographs become a framework for miniature paintings that play with doubling, erasure and time. Stereographs date back to the 19th century, when they were a popular form of home entertainment. The stereoscope—a handheld viewfinder resembling wooden binoculars—leveraged the newly discovered phenomenon of binocular vision to create an illusion of three-dimensionality. At three inches tall and seven inches wide, stereograph cards are shaped like elongated postcards, and each one bears two near-identical copies of an image. When observed through the viewfinder, the paired images on a card converge to give the appearance of depth. Though it is easy enough to paint a functional stereograph that looks three-dimensional within the stereoscope’s viewfinder, it is important to me that my paintings interrupt the original illusion. The small abstractions I paint gum up the works, replacing the three-dimensionality of the stereoscope with painted imagery that remains stubbornly what it is. The structure of the card invites the desire to look through or into a space, but the painting on top frustrates this desire, asking viewers to remain where they are and to reflect on the act of looking itself. I also love that many stereographs are captioned with text, and the tension I can create by covering over the original image with my own while leaving the caption visible. Painting the remains of a device that came from an earlier era of rapid...

Artwork