Ariela Steif | Ann Arbor, Michigan USA
I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and my early paintings were done in oil, but I have been working in encaustic more recently.
Situated in the charged and unstable space between representation and abstraction, my work gathers fragments of dreams and memories that are layered together, and negotiates the ever-changing boundary between isolation and community. I am interested in looking at the interstices of things, at sites of liminality. In medieval folklore the spaces in the margins, those which are betwixt and between – the edge of the sea, between night and day, doorways and thresholds – were thought to be dangerous places of power and transformation. These marginal spaces are reflected in the region that my paintings occupy: the no-man’s land between representation and nonrepresentation.
I work in encaustic, an ancient technique of pigmented wax that is applied molten and then reheated to fuse every layer to the one beneath it. Encaustic is a medium that is very much concerned with surface – and my surface is highly textured, raised, dense, and heavy with all the levels hidden beneath it. Encaustic has the ability to take on extreme transparency, which allows the simultaneous revealing and concealing of layers. It has been said that one does not look at encaustic paintings, but into them, because it is possible to look down through all of the tiers of paint that compose them.
