Down to a Science - Carol Prusa

Carol Prusa is the first to admit that her works can be a hard sell in the art market. “One, they don’t look like anything else, so they don’t fit in with what [the patron has] been buying,” she says. “And if you hang my work next to other work, it looks like a misfit. It likes being with itself.” Indeed, the art from this Boca Raton resident and FAU professor is not direct, as in a landscape or a balloon dog. It thrives on nuance, on the prolonged gaze, on absence as much as presence. Prusa’s art projects beauty and unease in equal measure, inviting visceral responses that we can’t quite explain, because we may not possess the language to do so. This is art on an astral plane, as if channeled from somewhere else. Prusa works with a variety of materials, including graphite, acrylic, metal leaf, video and LED lights. Her most prominent, and time-consuming, material is silverpoint, a drawing method dating back to ancient times, and which appears as ultra-fine silver markings. With silverpoint, a single one of Prusa’s canvases can take thousands of hours to complete.