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Karen Mahaffy is a visual artist based in San Antonio, Texas. Working across a wide variety of media including sculpture, installation, video and digital media, Mahaffy explores the seemingly insignificant elements between familiar objects, moments and places and the accumulated experiences of everyday life. She earned her MFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio, TX and has since exhibited nationally in galleries and museums including Artpace Foundation for Contemporary Art, the San Antonio Museum of Art, Sala Diaz, Blue Star Contemporary, and the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio; the McKinney Avenue Contemporary and the Center for Contemporary Art in Dallas; Locust Street Projects in Miami, SmackMellon and The Center for Media Studies in New York; and internationally at the Instituto Cultural de León in Guanajuato, Mexico and Kunsthalle HGN, in Duderstadt, Germany.
Mahaffy is the recipient of the Dozier Travel Grant from the Dallas Museum of Art; a Fulbright-Hays Travel to China and a Fulbright Scholars Grant to Estonia. She was the Artist Foundation of San Antonio Media Arts Grant awardee and artist-in-residence at: Bei Gao Studios/ Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, the Estonian Artists’ Association in Tallinn, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (as part of the Blue Star Contemporary Berlin Residency Program) and most recently the inaugural summer artist-in-residence at Trinity University Department of Art & Art History in San Antonio, Texas.
She is currently Professo ... view more »
Resume (PDF)
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Artist Statement of Work
Tell us about your work (style, approach, philosophy, subject and/or theme):
Though an array of materials and methods, I explore the exceptional contained within the ordinary; the prosaic moments and ordinary accumulations of everyday life and in particular our often unacknowledged capacity to recognize them. My work articulates seemingly insignificant elements between familiar objects, places and events to investigate how elements of place, time and memory become visibly manifest in our lived experiences. Alluding to sensory cues which often exist outside of the perceived space of the work, I am drawn to the liminal spaces between: past/present, stasis/erosion, memory/reality, image/object, within/without, presence/absence, purpose/vanity. I endeavor to create singular moments or objects which sets a pace at which someone may re-encounter them.
