Pratt Institute

Education

M.F.A., Boston University; Painting
B.F.A., Painting

Biography

Carla Gannis is the recipient of several awards, including a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Grant in Computer Arts, an Emerge 7 Fellowship from the Aljira Art Center, and a Chashama AREA Visual Arts Studio Award in NYC. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Features on Gannis’s work have appeared in Res Magazine and Collezioni Edge, and her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The LA Times, The Miami Herald, The Daily News & The Village Voice.

Carla Gannis, originally from North Carolina, currently lives and works in New York. Trained as a painter and having received her BFA from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and her MFA from Boston University, Gannis shifted to producing digital print and multi-media installation work in the late 1990’s.

Gannis is the recipient of several awards, including a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Grant in Computer Arts, an Emerge 7 Fellowship from the Aljira Art Center, and a Chashama AREA Visual Arts Studio Award in New York, NY. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Her most recent solo exhibitions include Jezebel at Claire Oliver Gallery in New York, Everything That Rises Must Converge at Kasia Kay Art Projects Gallery in Chicago, Il, Jezebel presented by Claire Oliver Gallery at Loop Video Art Fair, Barcelona, Spain; and I Dream of Jeannie Emerging from a Fresca Bottle at Christa Schuebbe Galerie, Dusseldorf, Germany.

Features on Gannis’s work have appeared in Res Magazine, Animal Magazine, 11211, and Collezioni Edge, and her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The LA Times, The Miami Herald, NY Arts Magazine, The Daily News, The Star Ledger, and The Village Voice. She is currently on the Digital Arts teaching faculty at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and The School of Visual Arts in New York.

STATEMENT: Appropriating from memory, mythology, and a familiar collective consciousness, the digital works I produce invite viewers to experience our inescapably mediated lives “through the looking glass”, where sexuality, power, and class issues reverberate in idiosyncratic juxtapositions. On a conceptual and technical level these tableaus consist of fragments that are reassembled at oblique angles to their original context. They are not meant to convey logical conclusions nor to allow for easy categorization. I feel akin to past and contemporary artists, writers, and filmmakers who uncannily deconstruct rigid notions of reality and perception. The extension of this sensibility with computer-based applications is only natural to me as a reflection upon the Digital Age in which we all coexist.