About:
R. Scheer is an artist and educator living and working between Philadelphia and Providence. They received their MFA in painting and drawing from Tyler School of Art in 2023. Rita has exhibited work at spaces that include Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, InLiquid's Park Towne Place in Philadelphia, The Cherry Arts Gallery in Ithaca, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, and Abigail Ogilvy in Boston. For the summer of 2024, they have been awarded a Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship to spend time as an artist-in-residence at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock, NY.
they/them
Photo Credit: Courtney Robertson
Flickering between the structures of painting and weaving, Rita Scheer shifts the way they (and others) might place themselves within a built structure, to mend alienation from the processes that hold components together (such as hinging, framing, and tying).
Scheer’s stretcher bar works are made with the cut-off parts of earlier stretchers. After enough stretcher pieces accumulate in the studio, over time and through making more and more work, Scheer imagines and articulates a new stretcher with these fragments. Then, they draw until they form a shape for a bracket that will allow the stretcher to function while also divulging its formation - and the formation of the stretchers that came before it.
The installation works use a loom’s heddles, meant to organize a weaving into a pattern, to instead make a drawing that responds to the gravity of string and the swishing of the air. It pulls attention to how structures are invented.
Scheer's drawings use perspective to change our relationship to space, to remind us not to view infrastructure as unquestionable, and to consider why our homes and places of work are constructed with such inhibition. Perspectival grid thinking is on shaky ground here, and there is a possibility offered to rethink organizational logic.
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