Carolyn Swiszcz "A Thin Place"

MIYAKO YOSHINAGA art prospects

poster for Carolyn Swiszcz "A Thin Place"

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MIYAKO YOSHINAGA art prospects presents A Thin Place, an exhibition of new works by Carolyn Swiszcz. This is the artist's fourth solo presentation at the gallery.

There is Celtic saying, "Heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in the thin places that distance is even smaller." In this new body of work, Carolyn Swiszcz considers these places where, according to Sylvia Maddox, co-author of the book Praying with the Celtic Saints, "the veil that separates heaven and earth is lifted and one is able to receive a glimpse of the glory of God."

In paintings that the artist says "depict what I have felt to be 'thin places' encountered on recent travels," various public places like the Whitney Museum of Art in New York or the Shidoni Sculpture Garden in Santa Fe are rendered in layered patchworks of gritty, muted tones offset by a few Day-Glo bursts, revealing a mulitfaceted approach to painting that incorporates drawing and printmaking techniques.

Though her sites of interest are popular tourist attractions, Swiszcz is more concerned with the creeping anxiety such locations engender when devoid of people or close to it. In "Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library," for example, the few visitors are dwarfed by the massive open interior of the monumental building. In "Mall, Santa Fe," a desolate mall food court is populated by a disarray of chairs and tables, while some of the horses of an unused carousel are represented as mysteriously blank outlines, as if they have leapt out of the scene. These works exude a liminal, apperceptive state, a feeling heightened by the overall flatness of the picture plane, upon which washed-out pigments bleed and coalesce in an unsettled, nebulous haze.

Recalling the alienation of the deserted streets of Hopper and De Chirico, or even the insignificance of the Lilliputian figures swallowed up by Corot's hulking landscapes, Swiszcz sardonically illustrates the almost cartoon-like impotence of contemporary culture to save us from the unyielding indifference of both nature and architecture. For Swiszcz, "thin places" are not necessarily filled with glorious experiences. "Admittedly, what passes for a thin place in my world is thick, clunky and melancholy," she says. "When the veil gets lifted, I am more often presented with a feeling like a pleasant kind of dread rather than something divine."

Carolyn Swiszcz lives and works in West St. Paul, Minnesota. She received a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

[Image: Carolyn Swiszcz "Shidoni Sculpture Garden, Santa Fe" (2011) acrylic and relief on canvas, 36 x 72 in.]

Media

Schedule

from October 27, 2011 to December 10, 2011

Opening Reception on 2011-10-27 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Carolyn Swiszcz

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