Monika Zarzeczna “Inventory”
Long Island University/ Brooklyn Campus Art Galleries
This event has ended.
Humanities Gallery
Monika Zarzeczna: Inventory is a solo show and a site-specific project in the LIU Humanities Building Gallery space, showcasing a selection of the artist’s free standing sculptures along with smaller wall pieces, all created between 2013 and 2017. The exhibition serves partly as a mini retrospective; the works in it have been created over the course of almost 5 years.
With the exhibition, Zarzeczna is contemplating the accumulation of work and ideas that happens to an artist after pursuing a solid studio practice for several years. Zarzeczna is also exploring accumulation in consumer sense in general: the accumulation of stuff. This is accentuated in the exhibition through an over-installation of space; placing far too many of the artist’s pieces in the gallery.
An attempt is made with the placement of all the works to create a system-or an artist imposed mode of control- to filter and understand the progress and process of the artistic ideas.
Zarzeczna utilizes this exhibition to put forth questions about art production and art consumption in general, but also about our culture, where ideas can be more important than the real thing, but an accumulation –be it of experiences or objects- still holds a universal value.
Monika Zarzeczna is a Dutch-Polish artist working in abstract sculpture and installations mostly using found wood, plywood, and repurposed materials. Zarzeczna’s sculptures stem from an exploration of objects, forms and their perceived purpose, asking deeper questions regarding the intent and history of an object.
In her practice, Zarzeczna assembles and preserves collected materials, colors and found objects. Her works emanate a feeling of nostalgia and reflection along with a simultaneous sense of urban decay and nature. There is a humanness also inherent in the sculptures and a focus on a sense of in-betweeness. Her work depicts ideas of transition — that of an object having lost its original function due to time, damage, or the gradual process of becoming unnecessary — exploring the in-betweeness that occurs when one moves from a known situation to an unknown situation or place. Zarzeczna attempts to portray the feelings and memories stemming from misunderstandings of systems, adaptations that are required, and new ideas that come into existence from that chaos. Her work emits an essence of something confused, reconstructed, interpreted, and changed; and although the work is mostly sculptural, Zarzeczna sees the pieces as drawings or constructed ideas; thinking made visible.
Her work has been shown in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Slovakia, Canada and in the US in the Sculpture Center LIC, the Lesley Heller Workspace and Spencer Brownstone Gallery among other venues in NYC and the David Castillo Gallery in Miami.
She held a residency at the Inverness County Centre for the Art on Cape Breton, NS, Canada, the Skowhegan School of Painting, USA, the Contemporary Festival Arte d’Avanguardia , Sardinia, the WCC Center for the Arts, USA and is currently a Chashama Studio Program resident. She participated in http://firstart.nl/ and the 2UP artist poster collective exhibiting in Printed Matter, MOMA Library and the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC.
Zarzeczna lives and has a studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
Media
Schedule
from October 02, 2017 to November 03, 2017
Opening Reception on 2017-10-05 from 18:00 to 20:00