BIOGRAPHY
Stephen Flemister is a mixed media artist who was born and raised on the south side of Chicago. An alumni of Columbia College’s Interactive Arts & Media program and Marwen Art Foundation, he has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries such as Dittmar Memorial Gallery at Northwestern University, Three Peas Art Lounge, South Side Community Art Center, Hyde Park Art Center’s “Not Just Another Pretty Face”, and has been a featured artist of HyPa and the Hennessey Artistry Tour 2010. Flemister has worked with several Chicago arts organizations, and provided workshops in public, private and charter schools
ARTIST STATEMENT
My artwork is concerned with the modern portrait through the lens of contemporary digital culture, and the ways in which we “see” one another, and alter our own personal image for public consumption in contemporary culture. Remixing today’s modern technology with traditional studio art, my work concerns itself with the phenomena of “profiling” and the concept of the virtual identity.
Over the past several years, portraits and figurative painting have comprised my primary body of work. I have long been interested in the idea of the self as interchanging variables of common visual features shared within social databases. My personal preoccupation with individual facial details running parallel and the notion of similar elements, particularly when it comes to African-Americans has become a means of exploration in my work in the recreation of the fictional, unknown or familiar.
In the vein of a identification sketch artist, my work has recently stemmed from the idea of service and function. My portraits often employ interrupted color and shape to explore the idea of the deconstructed face. The subjects and environment in my sketches and paintings are sometimes composed with textured rows and columns, similar to the way that monitors translate visual information digitally, in order to further explore the idea of the black body as vessel within the virtual environment.
