Cutting Holes For Eyes

Nicole Czapinski and Centa Schumacher are artists highly influenced by material exploration. Czapinski is an interdisciplinary artist and Schumacher is a lens-based artist, and both use novel materials to examine and understand their own experiences with reality and the not-so-real. The artists met at the Vermont Studio Center in 2018 and have been supporting each other ever since. They connected over a shared fascination with the unknown–the sometimes wonderful, sometimes frightening potential of the void. Their collaboration started in earnest in 2021 as they explored diving into each other’s practices through a series of call and response experiments. They have exchanged sample pieces, inspirational texts, materials and scraps from their studios, and even finished pieces, giving creative freedom to each other to alter, cut up, and filter the items. In this way they are handing their materials and work into the unknown of the other, letting go of control in exchange for an unknowable result. Their exhibition Cutting Holes for Eyes at Associated Artists of Pittsburgh features a new body of work made possible by the trust built between the artists through their collaborative process.