Sherry Karver is "not a 'traditional' artist, and am always looking for new approaches to the materials I use to expand their possibilities. My work pushes the parameters of photography, painting, narrative text, and resin surface by blending them to create a new hybrid. Most recently I have also incorporated jigsaw puzzles into my work."
She received my B.A. in Sociology from Indiana University in Bloomington, IN and her M.F.A. in ceramics from the Newcomb School of Art at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA.
Her artwork has evolved from creating ceramic wall sculpture into the photo-based mixed media painting.
Her work has been featured in over twenty-five solo exhibitions including the Sasse Museum of Art in Pomona, CA, the Oceanside Museum of Art, Oceanside, CA, The Morris Graves Museum, Eureka, CA, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art in Santa Cruz, CA, and the Peninsula Museum of Art, Burlingame, CA, as well as over 175 private, corporate, and museum collections such as: The Sasse Museum of Art, Pomona, CA, The Crocker Museum, Sacramento, CA, The Triton Museum, Santa Clara, CA, Santa Cruz Museum of Art, Santa Cruz, CA, and the Newcomb Art Museum, New Orleans.
Karver's work has recently been featured in What Women Create Magazine, Carpazine Magazine, The Woven Tale Press, ArtReveal Magazine, Artist Talk Magazine, Edge of Humanity Magazine, 5"x7", etc., and on the cover of numerous books, and has been reviewed over thirty times.
She was born and raised in Chicago and now living in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband.
About the Missing Pieces of the Puzzle Series
I am always pushing the parameters of photography by combining it with different materials to create a new hybrid, as in this series "Missing Pieces of the Puzzle". Photography is the first step in my mixed media process, not the end result. I photograph in public places such as Grand Central Station and on city streets in New York, Paris, Milan, San Francisco or wherever I happen to be.
This series expands the traditional possibilities of jigsaw puzzles made from my own photographs, by placing them within a fine art context. I am giving fresh and new significance to a material we are familiar with to help us contemplate what we are missing in our lives or in the world today.
People are often searching for things they have missed in life, such as missed opportunities, missed seeing family and friends, traveling, etc. For some it has been a search for the missing links in their own personal histories.
My husband and I started doing a lot of jigsaw puzzles during Covid19, and when they were partly finished I had the 'ah ha' moment, realizing they were more interesting with pieces missing, which gave them greater meaning. This was the inspiration for having my own photos made into actual jigsaw puzzles.
After they are put together I 'deconstruct' the puzzle, taking out a number of pieces, adhere it to wood panels and paint the negative spaces with oils. The final coat is a resin pour, which blends the puzzle pieces and the background together, not allowing the puzzle to ever be fully completed.
The omitted pieces are as important as what is left in, and can offer insight into aspects of our personalities. In life we are always making choices of what is important and what to ignore since we are continuously bombarded with information. The British writer Henry Green said, "The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in".
The left out spaces represent our search for the missing pieces in our lives, or in the world, and the realization that not everything can be found and replaced.
This series conveys our need to find the acceptance and serenity in what is not there, and the hopefulness that the missing parts could be open spaces for something new to enter the picture.