Bio and Statement
Denise Stewart-Sanabria was born in Massachusetts and received her BFA in Painting from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. She has lived in Knoxville since 1986.
Stewart-Sanabria produces both hyper-realist “portraits” of everything from produce to subversive jelly donuts, and full-scale, cut-out charcoal on plywood drawings of contemporary people that she uses to create conceptual installations.
Recent exhibits include: “2008 Biennale: Contemporary American Realism”, at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana, “Continuāre: The Figurative Tradition in Contemporary Art” at Ewing Gallery at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the 55th Mid-States Art Exhibition, Evansville Museum of Art, Evansville, IN, “The American Still Life: Yesterday and Today”, The Bascom, Highlands, NC, and the “26th Tallahassee International” at the Museum of Fine Arts at Florida State University.
"Paparazzi Draw at The Arts Company"
Artist Statement
Paparazzi Draw is my latest series of plywood people. These people are hyper-realist charcoal drawings on birch plywood, cut out and free standing. Part 2D, part 3D, they are derived from and eventually coexist easily with the live humans that attend gallery openings and exhibit crawls. The people in this exhibit are attendees of Nashville First Saturday Gallery Crawls. They have been broken down into observers and participants. The observers are free-standing, full scale people. They watch the goings on of the smaller scale participants, who are arranged into social groupings and mounted on wall shelves. This replication of reality completes itself when the drawings return into the gallery space to interact with the community they were appropriated from.
“Donuts Behaving Badly”
An Anthropomorphic Food Exhibit
By Denise Sanabria
Humans do things that amaze, entertain, and occasionally horrify me. If I documented them literally, I would probably have constant censorship issues. What if, however, I used food as a stand in for humans? Not only would it be amusing, it could even be delicious! Over the years, I have had pears enact lynch mob scenes, impaled maraschino cherries on nails, while on a more innocent note, squashes and mangos have posed as adult birds with their eggs. “Still Lifes”, which is the genre these works most closely fit in with, were originally domestic images containing items symbolic of life and death. The items in mine act out narratives.
In my “Donuts Behaving Badly” series, all forms of scandalous behavior are imagined. If it is hard to guess what is happening, the painting titles, such as “Binge and Purge”, and “The Immaculate Confection” give it away. Donuts are wonderfully fleshy and human, and can lay about with far more lethargy than even a dog on a hot day. The first series used the powdered and overfilled donuts I’ve purchased from Dunkin Donuts as subjects. The second series contain the more tan and muscular Krispy Kreme donuts acting out “The Seven Deadly Sins”.
