The Interconnected World of Carol Prusa

Arts & Culture

Pictured: "Thin Spaces" at Art Center Sarasota. Photo by Phil Lederer.

At Art Center Sarasota, hurricane prep means hanging four new exhibits, all of which opened last week. In Gallery Four, Line, Form and Color sees artists from across the state contributing artwork to a massive juried competition, featuring everything from painting and photography to sculpture and mixed media. In Gallery Three, the work of Sarasota-based Italian photographer Giovanni Lunardi is showcased through twelve large-scale photographs—some candid, some posed—capturing Italian life and fashion from the 1960s to the 1980s. Gallery Two takes a turn for the whimsical, with painter Lowell Gilbertson building his own mythology in World Without Men, creating a Sarasota-based interpretation of Biblical stories and featuring an all-female cast. And in Gallery One, standing with quiet insistence, the monumental and intricate sculptures of Carol Prusa’s Thin Spaces.

From a distance, Thin Spaces presents as an ode to geometrical perfection, in its spherical sculptures and square wall hangings, but closer inspection reveals a surface roiling with delicate detail. Working in silverpoint, wherein the artist “draws” using rods of silver as one would lead, Prusa can spend up to 1000 hours carefully inscribing her designs upon the acrylic forms, creating patterns complex but never chaotic, like a forest of flowing seaweed or a primordial cellular landscape. The juxtaposition speaks to an artist as apt to reference divine geometries, harmonic relationships and the latest unifying theories from the world of modern physics, as she is the artistic endeavors of Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo.

From a distance, Thin Spaces presents a grand order akin to a cosmic scale, she says, with the intricacies of the silverpoint representing the organic form of the thing at an individual or maybe even microscopic level. Importantly, as seemingly complicated or impenetrable as Prusa’s designs may seem at first glance, a careful order prevents the operation from descending into chaos, as every mark has its place. Such is the world, says Prusa, from the Big Bang on, with the space between nonexistent and taking with it any possibility of being out of place. “Everything is still interconnected,” she says. “It’s all one thing. We might see ourselves as autonomous bodies, but we are all linked. Everything is one thing.”

Currently showing at Art Center Sarasota, Thin Spaces is on display through October 6.

Pictured: "Thin Spaces" at Art Center Sarasota. Photo by Phil Lederer.

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