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�������� University’s Harlan Gallery will host an exhibit of work by Centa Schumacher and Nicole Czapinski from September 17 through October 18, 2024.

The exhibit, titled “Cutting Holes for Eyes,” features a body of work made possible by the trust built between the artists through their collaborative process. Their collaboration started in earnest in 2021 as they explored diving into each other's practices through a series of call and response experiments. They have exchanged sample pieces, inspirational texts, materials and scraps from their studios, and even finished pieces, giving creative freedom to each other to alter, cut up, and filter the items.

Nicole Czapinski and Centa Schumacher are artists highly influenced by material exploration. Czapinski is an interdisciplinary artist and Schumacher is a lens-based artist, and both use novel materials to examine and understand their own experiences with reality and the not-so-real. The artists met at the Vermont Studio Center in 2018 and have been supporting each other ever since. 

“We were unprepared for how this project would change us. What started as a fun exercise – exchanging materials to see how we’d use them – turned into something that ran much deeper. Our friendship and creative practices began to intertwine, and in the two years of working on this project an incredible sense of trust formed. With that trust as a base we sensed something shifting. In handing off our materials and work to each other, the meanings behind the original pieces fell away,” the artists said in a statement.

An opening reception for “Cutting Holes for Eyes” will be held September 19 from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. with an artist talk at 6 p.m. The event is open to the public.

The Harlan Gallery is located in the �������� Arts Center, 205 West Otterman St., Greensburg, Pa. For more information, please contact Emily Franicola, Gallery Director, at efranicola@setonhill.edu.

Nicole Czapinski () is an interdisciplinary artist whose long-term explorations of perception combine photography, scanner technology, video, and drawing. Since receiving a BA from Bennington College in 2006, her work has been shown nationally. Recent solo exhibitions include The Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Burlington City Arts, and Silver Eye Center for Photography. Her work is included in numerous private collections. 

Centa Schumacher () is a lens-based artist based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She works with a homemade tool assembled from vintage camera elements, creating work that distorts light and perspective. Schumacher has had solo exhibitions at the 707 Gallery, Silver Eye Center for Photography, and Bunker Projects in Pittsburgh, Pa. Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Paradice Palase in Brooklyn, N.Y., Aggregate Space in Oakland, Calif., and Art Ark Gallery in San Jose, Calif. Schumacher was the director and co-founder of the art gallery Phosphor Project Space from 2018-2021. She received her MFA from San Francisco State University.