Scott Henstrand BA(Art), MA(Ed)

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Brief bio:

Scott Henstrand was born on July 6, 1954 in Amityville, NY. He first studied Biology and Geology at Rutgers University in New Jersey from 1972 to 1975.  Becoming interested in Art after a studio course, and desiring to leave the East Coast, he moved to Idaho State University in Pocatello and received a BA in Art in 1978.  Scott attended the MFA program of Hunter College in New York City for one year in 1983-4.  In the Fall of 1984, though, he left the program to assist in building a school in Nicaragua with other woodworkers.  On returning, he continued to work in residential interior construction, furniture making and drawing until 1993.

In the recession of the early ‘90s, Scott turned to teaching and received a MS in Education in 1998 from Hunter College.  Currently living in Brooklyn with his wife Beth, his daughter Owyn, and his son Tim, he teaches 10^th grade Earth science at Brooklyn Collaborative Studies.

Artist’s statement: 

My work uses text in an attempt to glimpse the boundaries of text and experience.  The drawings render actual (or perceived) morphemes or partial phrases.  These language units are isolated and offered in a way that separates the viewer from the signified, such as reversed, mirrored, flipped.  The separation is never complete, though.  We are driven to create meaning.

In creating language, we define and form boundaries around our perceived experience.  This human drive constantly expands our comfort by defining experience in symbol systems, containing as much as possible in its umbrella of Unity and in this, contain experience in the boundaries of language.    My intent is to give the viewer language in its partial form, at the inchoate place where our given meaning to the drawn symbol falls between representing an abstract concept or a concrete object, where the ground can be as meaningful as object.

The question is whether we can experience our environment-our Place-outside of language and symbol systems.  Place is what is directly in sensory experience, what immediately surrounds.  Place is not what we ultimately experience.  Flooded in language, language as all, of the simulation, we live a virtual existence, determined to be fundamental rather than a fabrication of our social structure and which bypasses the physicalness of existence for our abstracted nature.