Bio:
Wade Schuster is an artist and art educator originally from Madison, Wisconsin. He received his BA in Art Education from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and his MFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. He has exhibited widely, with works held in both public and private collections, including the permanent collection of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas, Nevada. Schuster currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
Artist Statement:
Using walks through the city as a source of material, I gather sights, sounds, objects and thoughts; later looking backwards through this assorted “material,” putting these moments onto the canvas as poems and paintings made of re-assembled parts. Large scale text paintings and small scale abstractions work in tandem to explore the gap between experience and language. This is an aleatory, intuitive process, conducted in the public space of the city. In this new body of work I am exploring themes that have long been of interest to me, such as observation, perception, memory, time, and space. Since the work is inspired by fragments of material experiences, it remains phenomenological and avoids subjective construction. These paintings are less about looking inward and more about seeking connection with the outside world through time and space. I’m interested in the memories that linger after their perception, and the inevitable slippage of those memories. As a result, my work often straddles the real world and an imagined world, merging past and present, disrupting our linear expectations of time and experience, while imagining new possibilities. Like poems, the paintings are stripped down to the most essential information, both disclosing and withholding the fullness of their origins. Although this work requires sustained and reflective investigation, I approach the painting process with immediacy and eschew market-based decision making in an effort to make my response as authentic as possible.