ABOUT
Statement
I make place-based paintings, drawings, sculptures, and videos that invite intimacy with human-disturbed edge ecosystems, spaces, and species. Finding ourselves at the edge of climate disaster, I am interested in how queering, drawing close to, and staying with the often overlooked or willfully ignored impacts of humans on the liveliness of non-humans might create a space for empathy and begin to transform our perception of our place in, and responsibility towards, the ecological web.
My process begins with extensive research and time spent physically engaging with a place or species. The experiences, materials, artifacts, and imagery I collect during this phase guide my creative trajectory and comprise the raw material for my work. In the studio these collections are transfigured through repetition, recombination, and luck into resonant mediums, ritual patterns, and anthropomorphic and zoomorphic forms. I am guided by this question: What new ways of seeing might help us live with grace in these mongrel ruins of our own creation?
Bio
Tanja Geis holds a Masters of Fine Art in Art Practice from University of California Berkeley, a Masters in Resource Management in Marine Management from the University of Akureyri, Iceland, and a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art from Yale University. She has exhibited with FOR-SITE, Berkeley Art Museum, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, Institute of Contemporary Art San Jose, and galleries in Iceland, Scotland, England, Hong Kong, and Japan. Geis’ awards include a Graduate Fellowship and Affiliate Artist Fellowships at the Headlands Center for the Arts, a Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award from The San Francisco Foundation, and a Graduate Arts Grant from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts. She has been an artist-in-residence at Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Blue Mountain Center, and Kala Art Institute. Geis was born and raised in Hong Kong and is currently based in Oakland.
