Recognized worldwide, Dintenfass’ work is found in major public, corporate, and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum, Cleveland Museum, Detroit Institute, and the Smithsonian Art Museum. Her 2010 Parallel Park installation in Fort Myers, FL, was one of its largest and most noteworthy of the last decade. Her Babcock Galleries and Drop Dead Gorgeous exhibitions were both selected as one of the year’s top 100 shows by Modern Painters Magazine. She is the recipient of multiple fellowships and medals, and has been a member of the faculty of art colleges in the states and abroad. A monograph by Lilly Wei and book by Aliza Edelman explore the artist’s contributions in depth.
About the Scrim: TRANSPARENT and TRANSLUCENT
My scrim sculptures are about Transparency and Translucency.
"Almost Like the Blues” (named after a song by Leonard Cohen), installed at Longhouse is composed of printed mesh and installed on an undulated metal frame.
The mesh is marvelous material in that it prints color beautifully with excellent detail. But most importantly, when positioned outdoors in the open, the appearance of the material will change dramatically from appearing as a solid, and then change from being opaque to translucent to completely transparent as the sun moves across the sky during the day and by season. These aspects of the piece are encountered by the viewer, simply by moving. about in the presence of the piece. This is a surprising and intriguing aspect. The fact that both air and light (sight) can pass through the scrim connects it inextricably to the variables of human visual perception.
It is the fact that the material is in stasis that allows this “disappearing act” to occur. This would not be possible if the fabric was loose and waving in the wind- This ephemeral and surprising aspect of the material is especially effective if the mesh is strongly and beautifully colored and then seems to disappears as the sun changes position, and the material seems to morph into a totally different substance.
I was introduced to the creative possibilities of working with this material with my large public installation in Ft Meyers. I was intrigued and ultimately thrilled to see these incredible vanishing attributes occur in real time and on such a huge scale.
“Almost like the Blues” is the first of a series of standing scrim sculptures where I will be testing the limits of large-scale commercial printing processes in both scale and reproduction brilliance and exploring grouping pieces in connection with each other."