Announcing Carolyn Sortor as Glasstire’s Virtual Artist-in-Residence

by Glasstire December 5, 2020

Glasstire is pleased to announce that Dallas-based artist Carolyn Sortor will be the publication’s virtual artist-in-residence from December 2020 to January 2021. Held entirely online, Sortor’s virtual residency will consist of two projects, space-time for you (Nothing to see here) and beingtogether, both of which counteract the idea of the internet as a space for overstimulation. The artist told Glasstire about the main idea behind her two projects, saying:

“When there’s been so much happening, so much news to try to verify and digest, so many unanticipated exigencies to cope with, and, for many of us, so much isolation and/or so much time spent online, my projects seek to offer a modicum of support for equanimity and connection.”

Dallas artist Carolyn Sortor online art project for Glasstire

Illustration for space-time for you (Nothing to see here) by Carolyn Sortor

The first project, space-time for you (Nothing to see here), is a collection of webpages designed by Sortor. The five pages use color to give the work’s audience whatever they’re looking for: light, darkness, bright color, gray space or complete black. Sortor created the initial page of the project, titled “when you need a quiet space,” for her own use, to replace portions of the visual clutter on her computer desktop with a flat, soothing gray.

Additional webpages for the project, each designed to serve a different purpose, will be released weekly, beginning on December 6, 2020. The final two pages — “when you want complete blackness ” and “when you want more light,” will go live after New Year’s. To view space-time for you (Nothing to see here), please go here.

Dallas artist Carolyn Sortor online art project for Glasstire

Illustration for beingtogether by Carolyn Sortor

For the artist’s second project, beingtogether, which will run from December 21, 2020 to January 21, 2021, viewers are invited to sign up to spend time with Sortor virtually via Zoom. There are no special requirements or expectations for how the viewer and Sortor will spend their time together; this also means that there’s no pressure to maintain a conversation or even to interact. In other words, beingtogether is a way for two people to simply do just that: be together, without the pressure to perform or be “on.” To view the webpage for beingtogether, please go here.

The signup for beingtogether will open on Sunday, December 13th.

You can learn more about Carolyn Sortor below. You can read a review of her 2015 exhibition at The Reading Room in Dallas here.

About Carolyn Sortor
Carolyn Sortor uses video, relational strategies, and other media to explore dimensionality and systems including the socio-political. Her work has been shown in New York, San Francisco, Houston, Dallas, Albuquerque, and elsewhere at venues including the Dallas Museum of Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Meadows Museum at SMU, and Contemporary Art Museum Houston. She is a recipient of the Moss/Chumley Award and the Dallas Observer Mastermind Award, among others, and her videos have won both juror and audience awards at festivals, including first prize at the Aurora Picture Show Extremely Shorts Festival.

Among her past projects, she developed a template to enable artists to make video for the 999’ x 193’ LED screen wrapping the Dallas Omni Hotel and coordinated and co-curated the first program of new video art created for the display, with audio simulcast on KXT radio. She also initiated the OccuLibrary project, for which she and various other artists created aesthetically-informed reincarnations of the destroyed Occupy camp libraries; a physical library assembled in the course of the project is permanently installed at the MAC, Dallas. Her work has been favorably reviewed in The New YorkerArt LiesGlasstire, KERA’s art+seekD MagazineThe Dallas Morning NewsEutopiaArts and Culture, and elsewhere.

She has also curated numerous exhibitions and programs in the field of video art and has played an active role in various arts organizations, including serving as the first outside Chair of the Board of the Video Association of Dallas. Before she became an artist, she was a commercial lawyer for twenty years.

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4 comments

Rainey Knudson December 6, 2020 - 10:38 Reply
Erin Starr White December 8, 2020 - 13:19

Visual and mental peace…thank you, Carolyn.

Reply
Adam Adams December 8, 2020 - 19:16

Groundbreaking.

Reply
Janeil Engelstad December 10, 2020 - 11:15

BRAVO! I feel better about the end of the world!

Reply

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