Untitled (Vortex) | 12" x 9" | mixed media on yupo
Untitled (What the Ants Say) | 12" x 9" | mixed media on yupo
Collaborations
Mixed media collaborations with Ann Ropp
2011 — Present
TWO CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF A TITLE: A Series of Collaborations by Ann Ropp and Suzanne Stryk
Artists’ Statement
We know we’re investigating something, we just haven’t figured out what it is yet.
All the ants in the paintings are females.
If there’s something you don’t like in the paintings, it’s her fault.
Throughout this project, we agreed on all the collaborative paintings, but we couldn’t agree on a title for the series until Suzanne’s husband Dan said we were “two characters in search of a title.”
The most frequently asked question is, “Did you paint these collaborations together?” The answer is “No.” One of us would start a piece, and then the other would finish it in her own studio. We’d meet often to exchange work. Sometimes afterwards we’d go to Manna Bagel shop in downtown Bristol. Suzanne always orders a garlic bagel with lox cream cheese, and Ann orders a blueberry bagel with plain cream cheese.
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From Scott Koterbay’s review “Two Characters in Search of a Title” [Antennae / The Journal of Animals in Visual Culture, 2013]:
“ . . . the work appears both whimsical and deeply personal, amusing but also intensely serious, beautiful and, even, a little bit harrowing. In many instances there was clearly a story being told — often ants would be interacting with each, nibbling away at splotches of color, following one another in a determined fashion as if seeking meaning to their lives in ways that seemed almost philosophical.”
“Both Stryk and Ropp are very clear that this method was initially accidental, but developed spontaneously as a dialogue between Ropp’s animated abstract shapes and Stryk’s figurative additions, evolving naturally. Indeed, the collaborative process that both artists went through echoes analogously the coevolutionary pathways in the development of ant species, who are themselves intriguing creatures because of their eusocial nature that appears to be counterintuitive to Darwinian processes.”
Read more: Ropp-Stryk ANTENNAE REVIEW_Scott Koterbay
Scott Koterbay (Ph.D, Art Theory, University of St. Andrews) currently teaches philosophy and art at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of The New Aesthetic in Art: Constellations of the Postdigital, and numerous articles and reviews.
Ann Ropp has shown her paintings in numerous solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. In 2004 her “Body of Water” series was shown at the St. James Cavalier Center for Creativity in Valletta, Malta. Her work is in the collections of the New York Public Library, The Evansville Museum of Arts and Science (IN), The Printmaking Workshop in New York, and the Tom Peyton Memorial Arts Collection (Alexandria, LA). She holds an MFA from Columbia University in New York, and her paintings have been featured three times in the annual anthology New American Paintings. She is the recipient of a Southern Arts Federation/NEA Fellowship and several artist residencies, including one at Moulin a Nef, Auvillar, France.
Ann Ropp and Suzanne Stryk