Imagine being twelve and having Our Bodies, Ourselves handed to you by your mother. Suddenly, the body isn’t something you simply inhabit—it’s political, complicated, powerful, and entirely your own. Meanwhile, women are gathering in your living room for consciousness-raising meetings, talking about equality, autonomy, and change. It’s hard not to absorb some of that energy.

Fast-forward, and you’re making bodies of your own—glitched, fragmented, distorted, and occasionally misbehaving. Digital processes collide with paint, intuition, and the unpredictable pleasures of making something by hand. Glitching becomes a kind of productive destruction: break an image apart and something unexpected sneaks in.

The work lives somewhere between the physical and digital, vulnerability and power, control and chaos. Because bodies are complicated. Technology is complicated. Being human is complicated. You might as well have some fun disrupting all three.

For more insight into the process, check out this conversation.

www.galleryvery.com/in-the-studio


Bio

Cheryl Schainfeld (b. 1963) Quincy MA is an American artist living and working in Boston. She holds a BFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts / Tufts University where she studied painting, drawing and did coursework in Women’s Studies. She has exhibited locally and nationally since 2003. In 2019 she was invited to the DNA artist residency in Provincetown by Nick Lawrence, Owner and director of Freight and Volume in NYC. She completed a residency in 2006 at Gasp Artist Studio Projects under the direction of Magdalena Campos-Pons. In 2005 she worked as a painting assistant to Lalla Essaydi.
Schainfeld has also worked as a digital artist and creative director in medical animation, documentary film and broadcast design from 1983-2002. In 1985-1986 she worked as a computer artist in Oslo, Norway and in Stockholm, Sweden. She has traveled extensively creating sophisticated media presentations for varied companies around the world. She started a production company in 1988 that provided animation and editing services to the entertainment, financial and medical industries as well as educational institutions. Since 2006, she has been working as a full time artist and has maintained a studio in the South End of Boston.