STEPHANIE SUTTON
Stephanie Sutton’s performances for the camera employ conventions of labor and ritual to complicate assumptions of discipline and destabilize virtues of self-control. Sutton’s work is recognized for it success in transgressing the limits of the isolated subject and redirecting self-consciousness onto the viewer. Stephanie has been awarded residencies at the Goodyear Arts in Charlotte, North Carolina, Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences in Rabun Gap, Georgia, The Rensing Center in Pickens, South Carolina, and Alfred University’s Institute for Electronic Arts in Alfred, New York. Sutton earned her MFA from University of Georgia, and her BFA at Georgia State University. She is currently Assistant Professor in Photography and Expanded Media at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
ARTIST STATEMENT
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As a lens-based performer, I serve as my work’s primary figure, and accordingly, my art is both personal, grounded in my own specific experiences as a fat-bodied subject, and philosophical, using these experiences as a means of engaging enduring questions about subjectivity, alienation, and intimacy. There is also political dimension to my work, which highlights and subverts the many assumptions the fat body compels. Most often captured in the form of installations that combine video and photography, these performances contrast strict and demanding rituals (lawn mowing, mandala making, etc.) with seemingly indulgent behaviors such as excessive eating and dancing alone. As I argue, the fat body is a politically subversive force, powerful precisely because of its radical, hyper visual noncompliance. If the work develops from the particularities of my body, its ultimate goal is to probe the relationship between individuals and the many lenses through which we see and are seen.
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Stephanie Stutton
Assistant Professor of Expanded Media
MFA Coordinator
Dept. of Fine Arts at Winthrop University
248 McLaurin Hall
Rock Hill, SC 29733