About these paintings…

Indomitable Spirit

In April of 2020 I was invited to participate in an exhibition viewed from your call titled Drive-By-Art. For the project, I created a new work based on a 2017 commission for The Tasting Kitchens upstairs dining area. Since I already had a contact at the restaurant, I just 'poured myself a cup of ambition' and contacted them to see if they would be open to hosting me for this project. They were super receptive and welcomed me back. The work combines parts of the 2017 commission with color patterning based on a needlepoint chair cushion my mother made in the ‘70s. The architecture included is from El Segundo, Venice Beach, Westchester, and proposed lifeguard station by local architect Thom Mayne.

Since 'Safer At Home' began, I’ve been spending time with the needlepoint chairs my mom made. Memories of my mom (who passed in 2012), her artistic skills, and intellectual curiosity have been swirling in my mind. She had an indomitable spirit and in addition to her masters in social work, she would take night classes at the University of Chicago including an Albers based color theory class and multiple Charles Dickens courses.

This new work is an homage to her spirit and a reflection of the odd new rhythms life is taking in this pandemic moment. Echoing the ebbs and flows of our reconstructed ideas of connectivity, space, and time. In this moment of multiple simultaneous traumas, it felt weird to continue to do my job, it felt less important. Yet in a year where all my projects have dried up overnight this opportunity to continue to do my work was important. What I can do is commit to a percentage of the sale of this work to go towards Black Lives Matter and Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

Press

Car and Driver

Restoration Selections

Lake Powell Series

“…Lake Powell Series features three large color prints of family vacation photos taken by Schoenstadt’s father-in-law at Lake Powell in the 1970s. More architectural forms are overlaid on the photos: perched atop a butte, clinging to a shore, or simply floating above the ground. The images act as proposals, enticing brochures for your imagination: “Your modernist utopia here”. A third component – a solid colored, amorphous topography – is overlaid and interjected between the drawings of buildings and the landscape. The forms are complex enough to imply a specific derivation, but too complex to evidence the source. Using the ‘magic wand’ tool in Photoshop, Schoenstadt has digitally selected all of the pixels of an anomalous color in one of the other photos and digitally painted in the selected area that resulted. She has once again relinquished choice, but this time she hands it over to the algorithms of Photoshop rather than the subjectivity of a student or colleague. The resulting images contain visual layering that functions as a neat analog for the layers of meaning, process and contemplation inherent in the act of superimposing ‘a’ and ‘not a’. In these postmodern landscapes, culture (architecture) invades nature, digital invades the photographic, and the present is entangled with the past. Schoenstadt amicably obliterates the neat canons that have traditionally allowed for those classic binaries of art criticism and theory avant-garde and kitsch, author and viewer, etc. She is creating an imaginary topography that engages elements of desire, aesthetics, history and culture that are culled simultaneously from the fin-de-sicle avant-garde, mid-century modernism, and contemporary post-post modern sensibility.” Excerpt from catalogue essay “And, not Or: Kim Schoenstadt’s Composition for a Large Room in Three Parts” by Micol Hebron, Los Angeles, 2007

Press

“And, nor Or” Essay

15 Bytes“And, nor Or” Essay

Salt Lake Tribune

City Weekly

NPR Utah