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— Studio Artists: 2012

Skye Gilkerson

Artist Website

Skye Gilkerson’s work has been shown in solo, two-person, and group exhibitions in museums and galleries across the US including Samsøn Projects in Boston, Temple University Gallery in Philadelphia, and the DUMBO Arts Festival in New York. Skye was a 2011 Trawick Prize Finalist, and she was awarded a First Place Award from the Majestic Gallery, a Chenven Foundation Grant, and Artist Residency Grants with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Philadelphia Art Hotel. Her work is featured in Learning to Love You More by Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July, and is in numerous collections in the US and Germany. Skye received her MFA in 2009 from Cranbrook Academy of Art.


From a baseline of common experience, I use subtle interventions into ordinary, often ubiquitous materials to produce work that unfolds our awareness of our surroundings and destabilizes familiar structures. I use space, time, light, and language, as well as  architecture, landscape and the pages of a newspaper to examine everyday places and objects that are often unassuming and easily overlooked. 

Having lived most of my life in the big-empty-quiet of rural, central United States, I am drawn to the places in the periphery that are unmonitored and less defined. From the vacant building next to my studio, to the distance between mountain ranges, or the spaces that separate words on a page, my work begins with openings and gaps. I combine divergent elements from the places I have lived to explore the social implications and possibilities of these relationships.

Because of their subtlety, these pieces ask to be viewed with heightened perception, fusing our intellectual understanding of the work with a sensory experience, and allowing the familiar to become unfamiliar once again.

Gallery