Cheryl Wassenaar is a visual artist who investigates language as a system of meaning that is dependent upon arrangement and context. She works primarily with found commercial signage, repurposing the discarded wood into visual metaphors of failed communication that borrow from the language of modernist painting, contemporary advertising, and technology.  Merging aspects of graphic design, painting, and sculpture, the work evokes visual stutters of sounds, ideas, and data.  She also works collaboratively with poets and other artists to create site-specific installations that use signmaker’s vinyl, manipulated objects, video and sound to activate environments (see this for video walk-through of Cleavemark Dr. at Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts, a collaboration with artist/poet Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer, whose work can be found here.)

Wassenaar earned her BFA from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, and her MFA from the University of Cincinnati. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally, appearing in over fifty group and solo exhibitions. Her corporate collections include Camden Real Estate headquarters in Houston; Fidelity Investments in Boston; and Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI. Wassenaar is currently represented by LongView Gallery in Washington D.C. She serves as associate professor in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.

See more of Wassenaar's work here.

Parlance, 30 x 33 x 5” reconstructed found commercial signage, Wassenaar

 

"When the Eye Saw it Appeared,” vinyl, metal twin bed frame, egg-yolked teacups, electrical conduit, Cleavemark Dr. collaborative exhibition, Wassenaar + Schlaifer, Fort Gondo Gallery, St. Louis, MO