Red Lodge Clay Center Short Term Resident (AIA) 2025
Noelle Mason is a interdisciplinary artist whose work is about the insufficiencies of images to communicate important experiential layers that complicate the dialog and response to disturbing and traumatic rifts in the American cultural fabric.
Noelle’s work has been shown at the Ringling Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece, and at Phest International Festival of Photography in Monopi, Italy. She is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Grant, Jerome fellowship, the Florida Prize for Contemporary Art, the Southern Prize, the LensCulture Art Photography Award, the PHmuseum Grant Prize, the Center Sante Fe Director’s Choice Award and the Female in Focus award from the British Journal of Photography. In 2004 Noelle was a resident at the Skowhegan school of Painting and Sculpture. Noelle received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Sculpture at the University of South Florida.
My work is about the insufficiency of images to communicate critical experiential layers that complicate the dialog and response to disturbing and traumatic rifts in the American cultural fabric. I am especially interested in forensic surveillance, both as a witness and as a powerful means of control, and the way scopic enjoyment facilitates our engagement with this imagery. The work I make touches on some of the most wrenching fault lines of our political life and the way that images are used to make this landscape legible. It is this legibility that images provide that my work intends to complicate through subtle changes in medium from digital to analog, flat to sculptural, or new to traditional craft processes. It is this translation from image to object that adds experiential, tactile, or embodied layers intended to complicate the narratives that images alone often obscure.