Banner artwork: Carrie Lingscheit, Momento no. 2368 (Guise), intaglio print, 2010. Lingscheit’s prints are among those on view at Concordia University’s art gallery in St. Paul, in the exhibition MFAs in the 00s: New Printmaking through November 5; this show, one of several featured in the Fall Art Tour: A Nine-Gallery Crawl, is part of the Old World/New World: Mid-America Print Council Conference going on in Minneapolis October 13 – 16.
Detail from this work cropped and reproduced for access+ENGAGE with permission of the artist
About her prints, Lingscheit writes: “Human experience is plagued by an inherent incompleteness—both perception and memory being naturally imperfect, undeniably inexact. It is in our nature to yearn 
for completion, for narrative wholeness, to seek to fill in the gaps. Each day consists of roughly twenty thousand moments, defined as the few seconds wherein the brain records an experience. Every such moment is subject to omission, misinterpretation, and imaginative embellishment, and likewise each subsequent recall of that moment is subject 
to repression, convolution, and dissipation.
”Created through a process of editing, erasure, and exaggeration, these works allude to the intractable nature of remembrance, creating open-ended, implied narratives that invite a visceral response in a way that parallels storytelling—we often take a small fragment of someone else’s personal anecdote and re-form our own memory in reaction to its familiarity. We never take that person’s entire account and find our own experience to be identical; rather we are inspired by certain details, which allow us to forge a connection between that person’s experience and our own related one. The simultaneous presence and absence within my work calls for this kind of interaction—the familiarity of the visible draws one in, but the polysemy of the invisible, the erased, the absent, impels one to provide a personal context for this moment, one that conforms to the summation of memory that forms his or her particular identity. In this way I seek to propel the viewer toward recovery of some forgotten bit of personal experience, a narrowing of some lacunal void.
”I always feel an immense sense of victory when I suddenly remember something from my childhood—a tangible, almost physical sensation of information flowing like liquid back into a previously empty chasm in my memory. It is accompanied by a feeling that I’ve regained some small part of my identity that may otherwise have been lost forever. This sensation is something I hope to share through my work, creating a sort of visual archive of the kinds of shared situations and moments that interweave and overlap to make our experience human.”
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About the artist: Carrie Lingscheit originally hails from South Dakota, where she received her BFA from the University of South Dakota in 2006. Through exposure to several Frogman’s summer print workshops held there, she was able to work with many professional artist and educators, and ultimately developed an incurable passion for printmaking. Carrie has exhibited nationally, participated in dozens of national exchange portfolios, and attended numerous national print conferences. She currently resides in Athens, Ohio, where she recently completed her MFA at Ohio University and continues to teach printmaking and produce work.
You can see examples of Lingscheit's work on her website; inquiries about specific pieces may be directed to Davidson Galleries in Seattle, WA.
Related exhibitions:
Carrie Lingscheit is showing her work in two exhibitions connected with Old World/New World: Mid-America Print Council Conference -- MFAs in the 00s: New Printmaking at Concordia University in St. Paul and New World / Old World 2010 MAPC Members’ Juried Exhibition at the Catherine G. Murphy Gallery at St. Catherine University in Minneapolis.
She has also recently exhibited at Davidson Galleries in Seattle, WA in Introductions 2010, a three-person show with Ellen Heck and Matt Rebholz.
Credits: All photos and images courtesy of the artist. Middle right, Momento no. 19318 (Balk) detail, intaglio print, 2010; middle left, Momento no. 9690 (Muse), intaglio print, 2010; bottom right, Momento no. 13914 (Yield), intaglio print, 2010. Photo of Lingscheit courtesy of the artist.