“Interior Landszaft” Exhibition
Lesley Heller Workspace
[Image: Ewelina Bochenska "Untitled" (2015) Oil on linen 18 x 10 in.]
This event has ended.
Interior Landszaft, curated by Monika Zarzeczna is an exhibition exploring the intimate and imagined landscapes found and created through the necessity of life in a large city. Featuring works by Ewelina Bochenska, Alan Calpe, Suzanne Goldenberg, Alison Owen, Elisabeth Smolarz, Zahar Vaks, Joe Winter, and Monika Zarzeczna, the exhibition reflects upon the domestic environment, found objects, and imagined spaces as landscapes. Through these reflections, a narrative of the landscape as something internalized comes forth from each artist’s interpretations and intimate relationships with their surroundings.
Landszaft, a colloquial Polish appropriation of the German “Landschaft”, refers to both a physical region or tract of land as well as to an ideal representation of this terrain. The artists’ landscapes in this exhibition however do not show far away views. It is not the landscape that depicts regions or places, but their own adaptations of landscape, one that is fully fabricated, recalled from memory, and formed by one’s close surroundings; a landscape of domesticity.
This new narrative of landscape is told through each artist’s interpretations or memories of their own inner and physical landscapes. The resulting dialogue between ideal and fabricated viewpoints thus turns back inward to show the interior landscape; that which references hidden and private spaces, becoming intimate reflections on place.
Elisabeth Smolarz collaborates in her recent body of work with people in their domestic environments. Through hour long conversations Smolarz asks her collaborators to select objects of personal value which they arrange into a temporary personal shrine. Smolarz’ photographic documentations of these still lifes serve as a tableau of the individual’s inner life.
Joe Winter creates monumental fabric quilts inspired by rooms in a home and the objects found there, such as of sinks, tiles and floorboards. These large-scale textile works become abstract views embedded with the stories of materials and spaces.
Let’s Be Civil, Alan Calpe’s video work, explores a tenuous portrayal of domestic space as it follows the rise and fall of a soufflé, suggesting a fantastical journey of abandon into an uncultivated exterior world, and through the more instinctive processes of the body’s interior landscape.
Ewelina Bochenska and Zahar Vaks reference the tradition of landscape painting through the language of abstraction. Their paintings depict ideas of place, space, memory and the passage of time.
The sculptural drawings of Suzanne Goldenberg are made using detritus and reference structures of urban life. Her works, poised between growth and collapse, address the history of their materials as well as the infrastructure of their surrounding world.
Alison Owen discovers landscapes in the found objects and painted surfaces encountered in everyday life. Owen draws out the latent landscape in the streaks of glaze on ceramic test tiles by pairing it with a visually resonant found photograph.
In Porthole Hole and Extended Calm Monika Zarzeczna combines found materials with cut and painted aluminum to chase after memories of places through color and shape.
Media
Schedule
from May 25, 2016 to July 09, 2016
Opening Reception on 2016-05-25 from 18:00 to 20:00