 |
||||||||||
|
When Candace Knapp graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art with a BFA in sculpture, she was awarded a traveling scholarship that enabled her to visit the great museums in Europe, to cross the Sahara desert and to explore West Africa. She returned to the United States to get her Master's Degree in sculpture from the University of Illinois. After that she drove to Houston, Texas to seek her fortune as an artist. She had many different jobs including designing furniture and making statues for churches. Her sculptures, which were shown in galleries, dealt with themes of pain, entrapment, liberation, exultation and joy. They were suggestive forms carved in hardwoods that seemed to fly around in the air. One review described them as „a triumph of technical expertise and aesthetic sensitivity." As time passed she began making more recognizable entities and installations were shown in various venues. One was on a theme of all religions and was called "The Mandala of the Holy Ones" and another was "Ten Archetypes" and was exhibited at the Jung Center and Rachael Davis Gallery in Houston. In 1986 she met her future husband, Björn Andrén, and in 1988 she married and moved to Sweden. Here she made abstracted figures that expressed psychological states. Since 1990 she and Björn have been living in Brandon, Florida. Candace and Björn have worked together on several public art projects including the dueling pair of sculptures called "Litigation" at the Hillsborough County Courthouse, the "History Walk" and Pavilion Floor at Courthouse Square and the "Enchanted Mangrove Forest" on Central Avenue in St Petersburg. Candace has made many sculptures, which give the feeling of music by showing the effect of the music upon the enraptured instruments. Her recent work includes energetic forms in wood that suggest presence and personality. The theme is that there is a life force in everything and that "things" are really "beings". Artist Statement; To me sculptures are beings rather than objects. I begin by finding forms and images that have an emotional charge for me. I bring these elements together in an organic way. Forms can entwine, emerge, branch out, whirl in the air, fall or rest in one another. The resulting composition often suggests a situation or personality that is beyond what I could have consciously planned. I bring the parts of the work together in a way that suggests movement. Some of my suspended pieces actually do move. This movement makes the sculpture seem like it has an underlying energy passing through it and makes it feel more like a living being. - Candace Knapp The Art Pros Curators Dan Rojas, Vesna Anderson, and Denise Rojas |
||||||||||
 |
||||||||||
 |
||||||||||
 |
||||||||||
 |
||||||||||
 |
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||