The Ohio Artist Registry (OAR) is an exciting opportunity for artists to share their work, connect with the creative community, and establish an online presence—all on a free, virtual platform! The OAR encourages artists working in all art forms, throughout Ohio and beyond, to create a profile, which allows them to better promote themselves and their work. Being listed in the OAR provides artists with new opportunities to share their work with clients, galleries, patrons, and audiences. A listing in the OAR does not confer an endorsement, approval, or verification by the Ohio Arts Council.
For more information, contact Kathy Signorino, artist programs director, at kathy.signorino@oac.ohio.gov or 614-728-6140.
2025 Ohio Artist Registry Juried Exhibition
Karen Snouffer
Visual artistGranville Ohio 43023 United States Home Phone: 740-398-1981 Website: Karen Snouffer
Bio
Karen Snouffer concentrates on creating abstract mixed-media objects, collage, painting, and installation, while exploring tensions in movement, contradiction, chaos and order. Her experience with improvisational dance strongly influences her visual language. Materiality is a visual force in her work which is heightened with the merging of non-traditional media with conventional materials and techniques. Having researched chaos theory, she explores randomness and order in nature, in works of art and within the art making process. She is also intrigued by definitions of abstraction, how the brain processes it and how creating it impacts her mentally and psychologically.
Snouffer has exhibited nationally at: Art Center South Florida, Miami; Aqua Art Fair, Miami; The Work Space, New York; Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art; Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati; Hammond Harkins Gallery, Columbus, OH; The Ohio State University Center for the Humanities; Poor Dog Space, Los Angeles; Soo Visual Arts Center, Minneapolis; and internationally at La Médiathèque, Epernay, France. She is a former residency fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA, and a past Artist-in-Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; a recipient of six Ohio Arts Council individual artist fellowships; a GLCA New Directions Initiative; and a McGregor Foundation Global Exchange Grant to France. She is represented by Hammond Harkins Gallery in Columbus, Ohio. Her work is in the Girls Club Collection, the Pizzuti Collection, Sun Life of Canada, The Greater Columbus Convention Center and numerous private collections.
She has created public art works for the Pizzuti Companies, the City of Columbus and the Dublin Arts Council.
Snouffer has collaborated with poets, dancers, sculptors and new media artists. Her work has been published in three books: The Next Hedgerow; Love Life; Love Life: Memory and Nature at Play; and Somatic Principles and Dance.
Snouffer received both her BS in Education and her MFA at The Ohio State University.
She is a Professor Emerita at Kenyon College and has a studio and residence in Granville, Ohio.
Artist Statement
My abstract work evolves from repeated themes based on contradiction and movement, expressed in collage, painting, sculpture and installation. Working in mixed media and various genres provides for me a structure to explore disparate ideas and often offers exciting, unpredictable combinations.
Tensions in my work arise from imagery that develops spontaneously, while I freely allow parts of my psyche to emerge that otherwise may not be expressed. I firmly believe that we all have an internal visual language that can be explored endlessly. Because I have experienced severe depression and anxiety disorders, I am acutely aware of how chaos can exist within the mind and emotions. Therefore, I have become intrigued with the relationship between chaos and order as stated in chaos theory; that within the randomness of chaotic systems, there are underlying moments of order and pattern.
My work is often filled with random, illogical, about-to-topple movements, while among these are moments of ordered visual stops of rhythmic, stable repetitions. The drama is created with contradictions: still versus energetic, organic versus synthetic, fragility versus strength, bizarre versus logical, flat versus relief, wall versus room and chaos versus order. These opposites co-exist and agitate within physical and psychic space. The result is a composition that may reflect joy, beauty, silliness, mystery, foreboding, alone or in tandem.
In terms of space, I am fascinated with the crossover of two- and three-dimensions. At times my paintings refer to imagined, abstracted three-dimensional spaces. Likewise, an installation or sculpture may seem like a drawing, collage or painting expanded into space. I orchestrate flatness and dimensionality playing with and against each other.
Lastly, my experiences with improvisational dance create a body awareness that at times inserts itself into my work. Copious formal elements reflect movement in space, a searching for direction and discovery, found on paths and within layers.