Silver City hosting New Zealand artist Sophie Scott

Work by a print maker and painter based in New Zealand is coming to Silver City.

Silver City’s Artist in Resident program is hosting Sophie Scott, an award winning artist whose work was recently showcased in Christchurch and Wellington in New Zealand.

Scott is hosting a pop-up show and meet and greet from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday at the Silver City School House, 385 High St. Scott will share her latest works of art, which are based on the topography of communities in Northern Nevada.

The show is sponsored by the Silver City Volunteer Library, Healthy Communities Coalition, and the Resident Artist program.

Scott, who graduated in 2011 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, says her art is concerned with the tension of the urban and rural. She works through a reductive process of stencilling, usually from black and white historic photos. Of her unusual artwork, she writes, “My work is primarily concerned with the stripping back of an image. Through the stencil process I search for the point where an image forms and dissolves. My work consists of two parts, the painting and the stencil. The stencils are residues of my painting process, which hold traces of the hand on the outskirts of a preconceived structure of voids. The editing process of the stencil reduces the image down to what is essential leaving a confetti of geometrics.”

Scott also works as a shepherd on high country sheep and beef farms on New Zealand’s South Island. She said the move to bring her work to the Comstock was inspired by her upbringing. She grew up in Kingston, which was a main access way for the gold in the New Zealand gold rush, and is now a sleepy village at the bottom of Lake Wakatipu.

Recently designated an “Arts and Cultural Resources Production Center,” Silver City is home to a number of Nevada’s artists, musicians, photographers, writers, actors, artisans, academics and other innovative thinkers and unique souls. Through the Artist in Residence program, those creating in the performing, visual, media, design, or literary arts are invited to reside in town for up to four months, in exchange for offering public performances, exhibitions, workshops and art work.

The program is privately funded and directed by Theo McCormick and Quest Lakes. Artists have been scheduled through summer 2017, and additional applications are being accepted for later dates.

For more information, contact Quest Lakes at P.O. Box 123, Silver City, Nevada 89428, or quest@theodata.com. Information is also available at https://www.facebook.com/silvercitynevadaresidentartistprogram.