Susan Robb

Susan Robb draws on her own travel experiences, the utopian thought at play in intentional communities, and the hands-on ethos of DIY subcultures. She depicts the kaleidoscopic relationship we have with our surroundings. Her practice is an ongoing exploration of the interrelatedness of people and place. She combines poetic applications of technology (from muscle wire circuitry to methane digesters), an interrogation and manipulation of materials (giant black plastic bags to cultured crystals), and a re-purposing of forms and sites (bike parking-as-social hub; hiking trail-as-game space).

Susan is unquestionably interested in involving rather then addressing her viewers. Works such as Sleeper Cell Training Camp, The Long Walk, and Scent of the Trails require spontaneous involvement from her audience and in return deliver a reordering of the expected relationships to each other and their surroundings.  In 2008, she was awarded a Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs’ CityArtist Project.

Susan received 2011 GAP Award funding to create a three-month long exhibition entitled Floating Gold in a storefront space she received through the Seattle’s Store Front Project. Through the course of this exhibition she will use Seattle as a laboratory where she transmutes experience and location into fragrance. Due to support from a GAP Award, Susan can purchase a quality essential oil distilling apparatus allowing her greater control and access to the wide variety of fragrances of Seattle and the necessary glassware, bottles, jars, and vials to run and stock this three-month long exhibition.

Susan received 2008 GAP Award funding that helped fund the US tour of her outdoor, kinetic installation Warmth, Giant Black Toobs. She also received an Artist Trust Fellowship in 2002.