Gretchen Marie Schaefer
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Gretchen Marie Schaefer, Distillation, 2011.
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Gretchen Marie Schaefer, Tooth, 2011. Gold tooth, soap dish1 1/2 x 5 ¾ x 4 ½ inches This piece originates in Gretchen’s experience without a maxillary lateral incisor - a hereditary trait passed down from her mother. Braces pulled things aside and made room for a dental bridge that is now falling out with greater frequency, less likely to glue back into place after each failure. Replacing the missing tooth is an investment and prompts weighing the value of what is deemed a cosmetic procedure with public assumptions that come with a missing tooth. The gold bar provided for this exhibition was melted down to create a gold tooth made from a mold taken from Gretchen’s mother’s missing maxillary first bicuspid. In her body of work, Gretchen investigates the polar balance between the internal and external, the tension between visceral and graceful. A disembodied tooth, missing from a mouth and mounted on a wall invites inquiry, a queasy discomfort, and affects the exchange between people.
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Gretchen Marie Schaefer, Ontogenesis (detail).
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Gretchen Marie Schaefer, Orlan Jude.
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Gretchen Marie Schaefer, Oscar Eloy.
Gretchen Marie Schaefer was born in Denver, Colorado and received a bachelor’s degree in English and Visual Arts from Regis University. She is a current artist-in-residence at RedLine, Denver. and works at the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless.
Gretchen's work evokes organisms and growth through indefinable figures. Similarities between macro and micro, internal and external allow her work to investigate relationship and difference. These relationships have moments of unease as the delicate, strange globs of shinny mass reference internal organs. Graceful, fragile, organic growth and ridged, mechanic systems co-occur and awkwardly balance. Organic objects made from
synthetic materials heighten a sense of difference and these objects become specimens to be examined. Gretchen explores the tension that a thing can be strange, gross, awkward, while at the same time beautiful and astounding. Gretchen strives to communicate this through various media and processes including printmaking, film, painting, drawing and installation.
