Susan Chorpenning

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

Working with light as medium, I've made installations, public art, sculpture and paintings, exploring themes of impermanence, memory and the passage of time. Two series, Light Rooms and Dark Rooms, explore light and darkness as both visual and psychological phenomena. In 18 Light Rooms installations, I delineated the image of daylight crossing architectural space at a given moment, as in the first brief video. Actual light continues to move across my depicted image, illustrating the futility of trying to capture it. The title, Dark Rooms, (20 installations) refers not only to working in darkened spaces (as opposed to the Light Rooms), but to dealing with interior, sometimes darker aspects of ourselves. Ephemeral materials - light, shadow, afterimage - parallel memory and consciousness. Exploring a psychological shift over time, early work examined (my) internal wounds, expressed through art. In We Carry Our Prisons With Us, viewers sit in a chair with a photo flash on the arm. Black stripes cover the flash; when viewers push a button, they see the afterimage of black bars everywhere they look. While my materials haven’t changed - light, shadow, space, duration - what has changed is my orientation. Earlier works expressed tension, ambiguity, disappearance, and psychic depth; later works move toward integration and awareness. Influenced by California light, by practicing and teaching Buddhist meditation, the thread of my work moves across perception - memory - identity -...

Artwork