ABOUT

Artist Statement

My work is born of a longing for stillness and a compulsion towards action. Repeated marks, gestures and materials stand in for all the experiences we keep having; they are both the same and unique every time they occur. Whether in embroidery, sculpture, video, sound, or in improvised installation and collage, repetition is a lens that illuminates the relationship between suffering, desire and impermanence.

The ultimate paradox of contemporary American life is embodied in everything I make: we keep trying to relax by staying busy. My work self-consciously echoes the anxiety of constant doing, while offering a remedy for this pervasive busyness: the value of extreme slowness. I seek to provide breathing room by enticing viewers to look closely.

Informed by the constant interplay between micro and macro, my work refers simultaneously to the cellular, the human-scaled and the cosmic, as well as to the accumulation of time. These works are relentlessly about process. They are an abstraction of all complex systems—ecological, political, economic, cultural, biological—which result from the confluence of often-overlooked smaller parts.

My materials include thread, paper and the accumulated byproducts of cycles of the body and of culture. I use repeated gestures—rolling, winding, coiling, quilling, spinning, tying—to transform these materials into opportunities to contemplate the underlying processes in nature, culture and the human mind. Circuitousness is a remedy to our tendency to value linear progress over the reality that life is cyclical.

My haptic process and the viewer's visual contemplation of the result are intimately connected. Both are sensory experiences of repetition that can transform anxiety about impermanence, uncertainty and imperfection into curiosity about the mystery of what's here in the present moment.

Bio

Stacia Yeapanis is a Chicago-based, interdisciplinary artist, educator and writer. She explores the relationship between repetition, desire, suffering and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix videos, temporary collages and improvised, sculptural installations. Her first monograph was published jointly by Aperture and The Museum of Contemporary Photography in 2009. Yeapanis has been an Artist-in-Residence at Chicago Artists’ Coalition’s BOLT Residency, Vermont Studio Center, Facebook Chicago and Zócalo Apartments in Houston, Texas. Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (Michigan 2013), Heaven Gallery (Chicago 2014), Indianapolis Art Center (Indianapolis 2017), Robert F. DeCaprio Art Gallery (Palos Hills, Illinois 2018) and Kent State, Stark (North Canton, Ohio 2019), Finlandia University (Hancock, Michigan 2020) and Material Exhibitions (Chicago 2022). Yeapanis is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at SAIC, where she earned her MFA in 2006 and won a Marion Kryczka Excellence in Teaching Award in 2020. In 2023, Stacia launched Color Is My Dopamine—a retail brand that allowed her to transform the remaining materials from her impermanent installations into one-of-a-kind objects for everyday use. Works from the project are on display and available for sale at the Lubeznik Center for the Arts Gallery Shop through June 8, 2026.