Seton Hill gallery showcases artist collaboration

Pittsburgh artist Centa Schumacher knew she hit upon something good in the early days of her collaboration with a friend whom she met at a Vermont art studio in 2018.

Schumacher and artist Nicole Czapinski reunited in Pittsburgh in 2021. They formed a partnership where they exchanged and combined solo works forged from completely different styles to create new pieces of art.

Those works are on display through Oct. 18 at Seton Hill University’s Harlan Gallery in downtown Greensburg in an exhibit titled “Cutting Holes for Eyes.”

“We were unprepared for how this project would change us. What started as a fun exercise – exchanging materials to see how we’d use them – turned into something that ran much deeper. Our friendship and creative practices began to intertwine, and in the two years of working on this project, an incredible sense of trust formed. With that trust as a base, we sensed something shifting. In handing off our materials and work to each other, the meanings behind the original pieces fell away,” the artists said in a statement.

Schumacher, 38, a photographer by trade, said her move from Fresno, Calif., to Pittsburgh helped reinvigorate a creative process that led to her successful teaming with Czapinski, a Pittsburgh native who has since relocated to California.

Their partnership grew organically after they first met, and began looking for ways to push each other into new directions.

The art is a mash-up of their two styles. Schumacher’s work is seen through her vintage camera, which utilizes a special lens she built. The technique makes ordinary objects appear as microscopic organisms. Combined with Czapinski’s use of fabric, drawings and other materials in her works, the pieces are combined to form a new one. Their collaboration was experimental at first, then took off.

“We hit on something that was really good,” Schumacher said.

Their relationship started out as a simple friendship between two artists but morphed into a creative exploration of items each shared from their individual studios. It came during a difficult creative period for Schumacher.

“I suffered intense artist block. Nothing came to me so I was taking hundreds of Polaroid photos then wrote them off as not important. The block finally broke and I showed them to Nicole. She saw I had over 200 images in a box. They were hard to look at because I wasn’t that happy so I handed the whole box to Nicole. It was an act of trust,” Schumacher said.

Czapinski took those photos and with her own work, created new art that combined both women’s disciplines.

They said their work reflects what they described as a call and response process, with one putting forward a piece and the other responding and combining both pieces into a joined creation.

The Seton Hill show features 24 works.

“It’s about how we have changed, how we perceive each other. It’s opening yourself up and making these works. It’s learning how to see through the eyes of someone else and allowing you to be seen. It can be a pretty transformative process,” Schumacher said.