About
Jill Stauffer is an multimedia installation artist from Pembroke Pines, FL, with current residence in College Park, MD. They are a third year MFA candidate in Studio Art at the University of Maryland, College Park where they have taught as a teaching assistant in Wood Sculpture, Metal Casting, and 2D Design, and as an Instructor of Record for Drawing 1. In 2019, Jill received a BA from Middlebury College with majors in Studio Art and Architectural Studies. Jill has participated in artist residencies with NE Sculpture, Josephine Sculpture Park and Snow Farm: The New England Craft Program. Notable exhibitions include the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts Juried Exhibition at TF Green Airport, NextGen 11.0 at VisArts, and LevelUp at the Brentwood Arts Exchange, where they received the Juror’s Award. Jill’s research at the intersection of art and technology has been recognized by their reception of the ArtsAmp Interdisciplinary Grant and the Clarvit Fellowship from the University of Maryland. Their work has been featured in articles by the Washington Post and the Independent RI. In addition to their art practice, they have worked in support of community arts organizations as an arts administrator with DownCity Design, and as a teaching artist with VisArts and ArtWorks Now. Jill creates mixed media installations that explore the relationships between memory and place, absence and mourning, and the power of connections between people and the environment across space and time.
Artist Statement
Jill McCarthy Stauffer’s work explores the transmutation of natural spaces through memory, metaphor, and digital manipulation. In local and coastal ecologies, they see metaphors for transformation, grief, healing, and the hope for restoration. Mixed media installations combine personal experiences of light, sound, and shape in nature with scanning and natural samples in order to unify both qualitative and quantitative experiences of place. They incorporate field work into their process by documenting organic silhouettes and experiences of various ecologies through photography, specimen collection, photogrammetry, and memory. As a result, their use of light typically imitates the dynamic nature of the sun in the environment: partially obscured, appearing through variations of opacity, or backlighting the work. They use silhouettes to represent both absence and hope. Stauffer’s practice negotiates the increasingly interconnected relationship between technology, memory, and nature — the quality of the representation of natural landscapes in digital interfaces, built with materials mined from the earth, increases as the natural environment is further degraded. At the core of the work is a sense of anticipatory grief - of fear for a future where natural spaces are primarily experienced through digital media in the absence of the original, and how this shapes our relationship with the natural world.