PHOSPHOR PROJECT SPACE

The Rose Lifts the Cup is a collaborative offering featuring the work of Nathan Byrne and Centa Schumacher. This exhibition is inspired by Schumacher's experience with roses as a personal sign of being called upon by a higher power. Byrne and Schumacher explore this mystical experience by creating an immersive, multi-sensory environment that invokes the pleasures and struggles of interacting with forces beyond our control. The exhibition is an invitation to step inside a temporary sacred space devoted to change, destiny, and choosing the self above outside expectation--even against better judgment, even when the outcome is unknown.

Nathan Byrne is an interdisciplinary artist currently living and working in Pittsburgh, PA. Nathan’s hybrid practice takes place at the intersection of sculpture, the perception of memory, and heightened experiences of being to create enigmatic objects, archives, and environments. The use of unconventional and discarded objects is a way for the artist to engage with materials already imbued with a certain power, to make work with them can be likened to a collaboration or mutual aid.

Nathan moved to Pittsburgh a couple of years ago from the SF Bay Area, and has found this to be a wonderful place for emerging artists and curators to find traction. He hopes to return here after attending the University of Michigan’s MFA program, which begins in the Fall of '19. Nathan is a co-director of Phosphor Project Space. 

In her lens-based practice, Centa Schumacher uses abstraction and luminance to explore ideas of consciousness and the indefinite. Uninterested in what the camera can do as a factual recording device, Schumacher works with a lens assembled from vintage camera elements, creating a unique tool that distorts light and perspective. The resulting images become a portal between natural phenomena and the unseen world. 

Schumacher has shown her work in experimental environments including Aggregate Space in Oakland, CA and Root Division in San Francisco, CA, and has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), Kala Art Institute (Berkeley, CA), and the Art Ark Gallery (San Jose, CA). Her work has been published in the literary magazines Witchcraft and Art Kit. She received her MFA from San Francisco State University and is currently based out of Pittsburgh, PA, where she is the co-director of Phosphor Project Space, an exhibition space focused on emerging artists.