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, the Lohr Gallery, and the Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Paradice Palase in Brooklyn, NY, Aggregate Space in Oakland, CA, and Art Ark Gallery in San Jose, CA. She is looking forward to a two-person exhibition with collaborator Nicole Czapinski opening at the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh gallery in Fall 2023. 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.

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Centa Schumacher

Artist Bio

It is Longing to be Seen
Departing from the use of the camera as a factual recording device, I create photographs with a lens I constructed from cast-off glass elements. This lens, a combination of disparate components, distorts light and perspective. It serves as a tool that allows me to access a different form of reality and to see visible light in a way unaided eyes cannot – much like the Hubble and Webb deep space telescopes capture gamma and X-rays to bring us otherwise imperceptible images of the universe. In It is Longing to be Seen I turned my lens onto two subjects that at first feel very different–the cold light of space pushing against the lush yielding of flowers in full bloom–but with observation their similarities make themselves known. Light flashes off of dew inside the pistil of a sunflower that then bursts into view in a starry field. Luminous orbs bloom from the dark in familiar petaled forms, and strange eyes gaze out from the innermost center of a daisy.

These photographs are printed onto fabric and then cut open, revealing another layer of photographs beneath the surface. The openings in the fabric are bound in place with minute hand stitches, which keep the transient aperture permanently widened, much like a photograph pauses a moment into infinity. This creates the opportunity to gaze both into the observable natural world and a luminous unknown at the same time. As one world is split apart, like a snake shedding its skin, it reveals the other. Neither one is “real” on their own, but together they create a shifting, living thing that surrounds all aspects of experience, from the recognizable and the experiential into the intuited.

​Constructing these photographic objects represents a new evolution within my practice. A stitched fabric piece has a presence and dimensionality that feels like an exciting departure from the typical application of pigment onto paper. While it is created similarly to a typical inkjet print, when the ink is applied to fabric it becomes flexible and workable. When I stitch onto the fabric I am able to join photographs in a physical, embodied way. It is important that where the fabric is joined it is stitched by hand, allowing my own imperfections to be seen, as opposed to the work solely being the application of ink on paper by computer, placed in a frame behind glass. The resulting object becomes a thing that simultaneously exists in physical space as an art object and is a visual window into another experience as a photograph. In this way it feels alive and present in a way I have never before experienced.
The work in It is Longing to be Seen exists across a range of sizes, from small windows to medium flag-like works, culminating in a large, double-sided panel in the center of the gallery. Throughout the exhibition the works on the walls show differences–one thing opening into another. But in the center the veil is parted to reveal what has always been, showing their undeniable truth that is now, finally, allowing itself to be witnessed. 

Artist statement