ARTIST STATEMENT
Sharon Stanczak is a Massachusetts-based artist, whose paintings create windows into imaginative new worlds by transforming and fusing images and narratives from reality and unreality. Born in San Antonio, Texas, she was raised in a Latino-German family. This heritage manifests in her art as a love of dichotomies, diversity and paradigm-shifting possibilities. Over the past two decades, she has worked in support of life scientists and engineers, and she often finds inspiration at the intersection of life and technology, reveling in the utopian and dystopian spheres of the imagination. Stanczak’s practice grew from her interest in figurative art, a focus that is evident throughout her work.
A special focus for her has been the image of the female-appearing robot as a mechanized, sexualized, and colonized being. She developed a body of work based on these specialized machines which so often mimic women. Reversing the implicit sexism that is often a part of the look, sound and purpose of these robots, she frees them in attitude and conceptuality, and in doing so, empowers the women on whom they were inspired. Stanczak uses a variety of mediums for work, including oil paint on metal or synthetic substrates—including aluminum, copper, and mylar.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sharon Stanczak is a Massachusetts-based artist and curator who earned her MFA in Visual Arts in 2024 from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. She finds inspiration in the intertwining of the organic and inorganic. Her artwork embraces and reflects the diversity and possibilities of existence, as well as its struggles. She has shown her work broadly in group exhibitions, and has recently co-curated an exhibition, Future Yearnings, that explored the concept of the future as a place unfettered by the past or present–a place of empowerment, entanglement, of new possibilities.
© Sharon Stanczak