Artist Statement:
Stefania Urist’s artwork explores the entangled and fraught relationship between humans and the environment through research to educate, motivate, and question current systems that overuse and abuse plants, land, water, and the environment. Through installation, sculpture, and works on paper, she uses natural materials combined with recycled industrial materials as a method to create art sustainably, ethically, and honorably while mitigating environmental issues surrounding human-caused climate change.
Phragmites is a European reed that now propagates in wetlands and disturbed environments, creating monocultures and choking out native plants. While phragmites impose monocultures and suppress native flora, they also serve as a carbon sink, absorb emissions, cleanse waterways, and enhance storm resilience. Urist collects phragmites to mitigate it out of the environment and use it as sustainable sculpture material for indoor and outdoor work. She has made outdoor public art installations in sculpture gardens and indoor installations in galleries that are fences woven out of stalks of phragmites. These installations address environmental issues like species migration and where different species are “allowed” to live and their entangled relationship with human development.
Urist uses phragmites as a real and poetic symbol of the human interaction with the planet because it is imperative for the future of every species to change the status quo.
Bio:
Stefania Urist’s conceptual interdisciplinary artwork centers around the complex relationship between humans and the environment. Her current sculptures and installations investigate topics such as deforestation, trees’ memories, symbiotic relationships, and invasive species migration using foraged plants and recycled industrial materials.
Urist earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022, BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013, and has attended multiple artist residencies including at the Vermont Studio Center and the Uncool Artist in Brooklyn, in addition to receiving merit scholarships and grants to attend Ox-Bow and a Maker-Creator Research Fellowship at the Winterthur Museum.
Her dedication and skills are evident in the numerous grants and awards she has received to create new work. Urist’s project-based artwork has been shown across the US and internationally. In 2022, Urist exhibited an immersive, interactive installation at the University of Vermont and was the featured artist at Sculpture Fest in Woodstock, VT in 2019, 2020 and for the summer of 2023. She was an artist fellow at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, NY in 2023 where she created an immersive installation out of phragmites. In 2023, Urist had a piece in a traveling exhibit throughout Switzerland called Dear 2050 Entangled Forests, a group show that focused on forests in a changing climate.
Currently working in Londonderry, VT, Urist continues to create new work that challenges and inspires audiences to consider their relationships with the natural world.