Amy Sacksteder’s work explores artifacts as vehicles of human connectedness to specific places and occurrences. Compelled by interactions with the land and landscape, she investigates the personal, environmental, and political significances of place. She’s interested in idiosyncratic, ephemeral contrasts that draw her attention as she moves through her daily life, often capturing these moments with her phone’s camera to use as source imagery. Sacksteder’s drawn to human interventions in the natural world such as cairns, surveyor’s markings, and chunks of concrete and slag, alongside fleeting moments such as melting ice, light on water, shimmering shadows. A personal investment in essential materials--tarnishing silver leaf and volcanic ash, for example--infuses and activates the work, such as may occur with the aura of a beloved souvenir.
Such artifacts and images become a palette of elements from which to draw while working in the studio. In her working with them, their context is altered. They’re transmuted. Repetition among the various formats creates an echoing, recursive conversation among paintings, drawings, collages, and ceramic vessels; between the depicted and the displayed. The splicing of specific imagery and materials with formal elements such as shape, line, and color, results in work that pivots on the cusp between realism and abstraction.
Amy Sacksteder has participated in exhibitions nationally and internationally. Recent solo and two-person venues include the University of Mississippi (Oxford, MS); the Ann Arbor Art Center (MI) and the University of Michigan Institute for Humanities (Ann Arbor, MI). Recent group venues include Tiger Strikes Asteroid--Greenville (SC); Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY); BasBlue (Detroit, MI); River House Arts (Toledo, OH); and Buckham Gallery (Flint, MI). She currently has work in a two-person exhibition at James May Gallery (Milwaukee, WI,) and a group exhibition at Tyger Tyger Gallery (Asheville, NC).
Sacksteder has completed artist residencies at SÍM (Reykjavík, Iceland); Takt (Berlin, Germany); The Hungarian Multicultural Center (Budapest, Hungry); and the Ragdale Foundation (Lake Forest, IL); among others. In 2012 she was awarded a Gallery-as-Studio Residency and solo exhibition at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her work has been featured and reviewed in journals such as The Offing, Flint Magazine, New American Paintings and the Chicago Tribune and has been included in the curated online registries of The Drawing Center, White Columns, and the Flat File 2022 Program at Ortega y Gasset Projects, where she was also highlighted as a 2022 Artist to Watch.
Affiliations include invited membership in the Long Island City Studios (Queens, New York); Ypsi Alloy Studios (Ypsilanti, MI)—a studio dedicated to her ceramic work; and IBIS Contemporary (New Orleans, LA), where she has been a represented artist since 2021. Sacksteder and her family live in Ypsilanti, Michigan, outside of Detroit. Sacksteder works from her studios in Ypsilanti and Long Island City, and is a professor in the School of Art & Design at Eastern Michigan University.