Where is the last place you expect to find rain? Indoors, of course, which makes this massive, intricate and well-executed rain art installation by Stacee Kalmanovsky not only technically impressive but a shock to the senses when you first see it. Making rain isn’t easy – even if you’re making it out of acrylic.

As impressive as the hand-crafted drops strung together by hundreds of strings is the inherent interactivity of such an isolation – it invites people to move through it, brushing the motionless rain into new and unplanned directions and engendering conversations.

Despite the complexity of experience the materials are simple: fishing lines, plastic beads and a good deal of time were the core elements it took to create this. In her words: “Stacee Kalmanovsky’s work is rooted in the uncanny, suggestive, and picturesque. Her urge to invent and exaggerate is tempered by a deep dedication to the medium at hand. She believes in the conceptual process itself, from gathering information and sorting through, manipulating, and qualifying the image, to the indisposable skill to achieve the end result. Like in the alchemic process, the raw matter (sulfur = visual information) is transformed, refined, and persuaded into its purest form (gold = art).”

About Stacee Kalanovsky

“Currently I am on my sixth life.  I live near a lake and some woods and wait for my children to burst through the door.  In my previous life I performed my MFA at the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Art.  Prior to my appearance I lived and died in Florence, Italy from a poisoned fruit.  In my third life I was semi-spoiled and American and rode around in the back of trucks, sometimes dancing.  The life before that I was a mermaid in Rome.  My very first life I was born in the Soviet Union, there people spent life standing in line for some sausage.  In each life I am an artist.”

“Often, I let the objects and materials do the ‘talking,’ and believe in their secret intelligence.   I think of myself as provoking, indulging, and enabling the inanimate to perform.  The materials, colors, and installations all become part of a new kind of visual sentence, that with the sum of their parts transcends their sometimes humble origins. I deflate and inflate a plastic bag until it loosens into a breath, and then hangs like a field of color.  The quotidian detritus is paired with sculptural forms that are the relatives of furniture, pedestals, and amorphous minimalist limbs, creating an uneven intimacy.”