Rosalux Member Since 2015
My studio practice explores the engagement of the body’s senses with the surrounding environment. The work births from potent encounters with the natural world, anchored in the relationship between perception, landscape and cultural consciousness. Painting requires a delicate balance between observation and action. For me, it is a meditation on the complicated relationship between our bodies and the landscapes we inhabit.
Generally influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the “primacy of perception,” through the process of painting, I attempt to harness a kinesthetic understanding of our body in space. I aim to capture an embodied awareness and connectedness to materiality, light and pressure that we all possess, but at times fail to recognize amidst the background noise. Responding to the corporeal activity of laying paint on canvas, I activate its abilities by scraping, expanding, mixing, and overlapping layers. Interweaving the psychological space and materiality of paint, I search for reciprocity between the boundaries of real and imagined; subjective and objective; intimacy and immensity; self and other.
Betsy Ruth Byers is an artist and an Associate Professor at Gustavus Adolphus College. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited at the National Galleries of Scotland, SCOPE International Art Fair, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, DeVos Art Museum, Hillstrom Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Intermedia Arts, Guilford Art Center and The Soap Factory. Her work resides in several private, corporate and museum collections including the Weisman Museum of Art, Hillstrom Museum of Art, Target Corporation, MN Vikings Corporation, Nordstrom Corporation, BMO Harris Bank, LPM Corporation, and Allina Health Center.
