Carla Arocha received a degree in Biology, from St. Xavier University, Chicago in 1986, and in 1991 she received a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, followed by her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1994. Schraenen attended Higher Institute for Communication Management of the Province of Antwerp in 1992, and in 1996, graduated from Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp. The two began collaborating publically in 2007 with their exhibition Mauraders at moniquemeloche.
Within the work of Arocha–Schraenen, simile and facsimile are often content; the nature of an image and its similarity or distance from the perception of that image. In the works that play with layering and blurring the lines between what is, in reality, a solid surface and what is only a reflection– or the facsimile of a tangible material– Arocha–Schraenen join the dotted lines between Modernism’s approach to something nearing an abstracted form of representation and the age old mimetic thrust of art drawing upon observations of the world around us.