Stephanie Todhunter is an American-Midwest artist living and working in the Boston area.
I oscillate between analog and digital, between found images and constructed images, between creation and destruction. I gather materials from a wide variety of sources including Ebay, thrift stores, Wikimedia Commons and trash-picking. I use open-source graphic editing software to create digital compositions, then use a toner-transfer alternative printmaking process to transfer those images to canvas, plywood or paper. By bouncing back and forth between traditional and new technologies I create a hybrid work, an original work of nostalgia.
Assembling and dismembering fragments of American pop culture, I create new worlds and build new narratives out of the old. I use such hands-on techniques as ripping, sanding, scraping and over-painting to introduce uncertainty and unpredictability, creating tension between chaos and control. I am interested in the conflict between the internal and the external, the private and the public.
I work in two and three dimensions, with paper and plastic, both purchased and found. I combine elements from my childhood- isolation, stranger danger, missing children, parental neglect and “satanic panic”, with contemporary feminism and pop culture motifs: body dis-morphia, second/third/fourth wave feminism and cancel culture. I compare the past and the present: Roe vs Wade, affirmative action, the race to the moon, women's liberation and personal identity.
World-building enables me to explore the ways in which societal norms affect personal relationships. I am fascinated by how artists' characters and creations fit into the worlds they have created, the personal rules they follow and the stories they tell.