Benincasa in TSA-AIR Program

March 14, 2011

Faculty member Pat Benincasa has been accepted to the Toronto School of Art - Artist in Residency Program (TSA_AIR) for 4 weeks this summer. Her residency will include TSA faculty artists and visiting artist lectures, 24-hour access to individual studio, and use of Sculpture Studio, Digital Lab, and TSA Library.

Admission to the residency is based primarily on project proposal, work samples, and CV. Pat's project proposal is focused on the american rust belt cities. “Rust Belt” is a term given to the catastrophic decline of major steel, auto, and rubber manufacturing cities like Detroit, Flint, Toledo, Akron, Youngstown, Buffalo, Gary, and St. Louis. She is working on a series of large scale paintings made from industrial materials.

Her project is best summed up when she says, “As an artist forged within that industrial sensibility I am compelled to focus my creative expression on these once great thriving cities, not for nostalgia or to romanticize - but to examine with the distance of time and place these rusted out urban hulls. My work probes the geographic metaphysics of urban decline. With decline, the void is undefined space waiting for possibility. These Rust Belt cities may just be where future meets the past.”

Image Credit

Pat Benincasa
Detroit, 2010
encaustic, oil, industrial materials on panel
36" X 68" X 2.5"