Artist Statement
The genres of the figurative, self-portraiture and landscape have distilled a potent brew of imagery and symbol within my studio practice. These serve as shorthand for death, desire, loss, aging, self, our place in nature and our relationship to the sublime. My methods—traditional—like oil painting—and less conventional—like new technologies—align means with the content of these timeless themes.
Like many artists past and present, I am fascinated with the science of color and vision. I am currently investigating this science with the help of a new tool that sheds light on how we see—and developing a series of paintings specifically for this new technology. This new technology was built by the Arizona State University SciHub team.*
This new artwork will enhance our understanding of human colorblindness; and appreciation for how other lifeforms—some with lesser and some with greater visual capacity than ours—observe the world around us. Vision is created in the context of the whole of nature.
The series of oil paintings will include 20-inch tondos based on the Ishihara Plates that are used to test for colorblindness, as well as larger brilliantly hued landscapes.
*Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek, Professor Nathan Newman, Professor Dan Marshall, Domenic Bonelli, Dr. Justin Pye, and Krish Bharat Majethia.
Bio
Penny Cagney was born, raised and educated in greater Chicago, earning a BFA., magna cum laude, from Loyola University; a MA in arts management from Columbia College; and in 2021, a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited her work at California State University, Fresno; the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA; and the Los Angeles Art Association. Making art has always been her greatest passion, but Cagney believes that she helped people through her work in nonprofit management and fundraising for many nonprofits, including art centers, museums, and various performing arts organizations (i.e., tthe Joffrey Ballet of Chicago; National Cultural Center of Egypt; ASU Art Museum; and the Musical Instrument Museum). Cagney also wrote/edited five books on management topics, taught at the graduate level (arts administration at the School of the Art Institute and Columbia College in Chicago; Distinguished Visiting Professor at the American University, Cairo, Egypt) and presented around the world. She served on the board of directors at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and on auxiliary boards at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Chicago Academy for the Arts. She devotes herself entirely to her art practice today in Santa Cruz, CA and Tempe, AZ.
