Priscilla Stadler

Rooted 63, 2021

Spray paint on paper
12 x 9 inches
$270 

Artist Website

For sales inquiries, contact boxoffice@flushingtownhall.org

Artist Statement

As an interdisciplinary visual artist, my creative process ranges from drawing to fabric installation to designing collaborative conversations around community issues. Varied approaches like these enable me to explore the resilient and sometimes precarious structures of connectedness – whether among trees, or among humans.

The Rooted series uses line, movement, pattern, and layers to envision dynamic communication among fungal networks, tree roots, and soil. Working with spraypaint enables me to explore the fluid sense of permeability among roots, fungi, and soil. This series is rooted in science, but also in the intangible. Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard has proven that trees are able to share resources – and to communicate - with each other, and biologist Merlin Sheldrake investigates fungal behavior, challenging the (human) concept of intelligence as requiring a brain, since fungi have demonstrated awareness and memory through growth choices even without a cerebrum.

In Songs of Trees, George David Haskell writes, “To listen is…to touch a stethoscope to the skin of a landscape, to hear what stirs below.” Using the stethoscope of creative imagining, in conjunction with reading works by biologists and botanists, inspires me to keep learning, researching, and making, while engaging in a process of visual listening and learning.
 

About The Artist

Priscilla Stadler’s work has appeared in the Hammond Museum, Queens Museum, the New Museum, Flux Factory, Art in Odd Places, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, and other venues throughout NYC. Spanning installation, wall work, and community dialogue, her projects have been funded by MoreArt, the Citizens Committee of NY, Queens Art Intervention, and the Queens Council on the Arts. She was a MoreArt Engaging Artist in 2016. In 2017-18,  “Almost Home/Casi Llegando a Casa”, her year-long collaboration with Five Boro Story Project and Queens Neighborhoods United, was selected for the MoreArt project grant. Stadler was a 2014 Create Change Fellow with The Laundromat Project. She was selected as a finalist for Dieu Donne’s workspace program in 2010. Stadler has completed artist residencies at the Contemporary Artists Center (Troy, NY), ACRE (Chicago), and Vermont Studio Center. She is part of the Spliced Connector artist network on artsy.net