Uma Halsted

Statement

Imagine feeling. Floating in a body, concentrated with saltwater. Your internal water reaches out and your skin dissolves to greet this new home. You are here. Then you remember your eyes and their act of seeing the material that hangs before you.

Always returning to organic forms, my work explores bodies of water and how their puddling and spreading properties connect the human experience with the earth through shared memories of the womb. I make large-scale paintings that become sculptural forms in spatial installations. The process of creation is as important as my final paintings themselves, evoking performance-art through traces of my touch.

My paintings transcend the frame, molding themselves into organic, bulbous forms of unstretched canvas. They expose their own insides and become waste receptacles of discarded pigment, transmitting water like a membrane in osmosis. What I exhibit is the imprint of transmitted paint from one canvas to another, from one side to the other, and the trace of what has been painted in the past and grows into a form in the present. Like water, my works are unfixed and constantly morphing beyond formal interpretation.

GlogauAIR Project

During my residency at GlogauAIR, I will conduct an artistic excavation in discard. In my art practice, the act of creating and maintaining a canvas, sculpture, or space also becomes an act of dirtying it through accumulation of paint and material. My work’s emphasis on water and subliminal embodiment evokes Freud’s oceanic feeling, while its attention to discard – especially in the form of rags – recalls Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ragpicker as he articulates it in his Arcades Project (1927-1940). As I research and explore these two theoretical frameworks – primarily the latter – during my residency, I will critically consider the role of the body and how themes of embodiment relate to discard and regeneration. In the context of our ever growing digital world and subsequent dissociation and disembodiment of individuals today, I am invested in rekindling the body through my work and reconnecting a person to their sensorial, fleshy self. I will perform this reconnection through rituals of collecting what has been rejected and released and accumulates behind us. Prompted by Benjamin, I am interested in acts of relation and transference and in how gestures of rejecting/releasing and receiving/transferring can go hand-in-hand to create a symbiotic, bodily whole.

CV Summary

Education

• 2018-2022 Barnard College of Columbia University, B.A. in Art History (Concentration in Visual Arts) & English Literature
• 2022 International Center of Photography (ICP), Alternative Processing Photography Workshop

Exhibitions

• 2022 Barnard Undergraduate Senior Thesis Show, Curated by Piper Marshall, New York
• 2019 Painting Show, Group show at Postcrypt Art Gallery, New York

Awards and Grants

• 2022 W. Cabell Greet Prize, Barnard graduation award to a major for excellence in English
• 2021 Growing the Arts Grant, Awarded funding for work in the art

Gallery