 |
Martynka Wawrzyniak | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1979 (age 43–44) |
| Years active | 1999-present |
| Website | www.martynka.com |
Martynka Wawrzyniak (born 1979) is a New York City-based, Polish-American mixed-media artist who works in photography, video, performance, sculpture, and installation.
Born in Poland, she moved to New Zealand at the age of eight and has lived in New York since 1998.
Martynka Wawrzyniak's artistic evolution has drifted from photography and video to performance and installations, often bringing the viewer into a deeply intimate rapport with the artist-cum-subject. She is known for work that engages the senses, often while incorporating experimental techniques.
Ziemia is a public-art project created in collaboration with residents of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY that was completed and installed in June 2018. In the form of a ceramic sphere atop a native meadow in McGolrick Park, the piece bridges divides between the neighborhood's disparate subcultures by serving as a collective portrait of the community through embodying residents' personal homelands and migration stories.
Greenpoint is experiencing a demographic transformation as gentrification pushes out many longtime residents. With the rising displacement and relocation of peoples across the world, Ziemia responds to the need for collective reflection in communities on migration as not merely a global phenomenon, but as a local, micro experience that unites us all.
The ceramic orb is glazed with a mixture of clay excavated in Greenpoint and soils contributed by participating residents from places that are symbolically representative of their identities, including: The United States, Poland, Ukraine, Germany, France, Japan, Serbia, Nepal, the United Kingdom, Ecuador, Mexico, and Namibia. The project includes many Poles who have lived in Greenpoint for generations, and Wawrzyniak personally traveled to Poland to collect soil on behalf of Polish residents who were unable to make the journey. With soil—universally symbolic for one's roots and identity—as the medium, Ziemia gestures to the primal connection to Earth that underlies each individual's migratory experience. As the transitional phase in nature between death and life, soil refers to the cyclical patterns of neighborhood growth and change.
Wawrzyniak chose the materials specifically for their significance in Greenpoint's history. The meadow, composed of native and doppelgänger plant species, references Greenpoint's pastoral past as the once fertile land that sustained Native Americans and settlers.
The international soil was imported with an official USDA soil importing permit and heat treated by a team of chemistry research students at Lehman College. The students have been important partners in the project and are conducting tests on the soils for mineral content as well as traces of pollution.
The public art piece serves as a central location for events to encourage cross-cultural exchange and initiate dialog about immigration and the human relationship with the natural world. Ultimately, the project aims to bring attention to the ties, both sentimental and vital, that we have to the land we call home.
For her Feed exhibition, at envoy enterprises, New York in September 2014 Wawrzyniak committed to a year-long daily exercise which involved the use of one identical 20 x 20 -inch white cloth dinner napkin to wipe her mouth each night at dinner. She then proceeded to file the napkins with a detailed record of the ingredients of what she ate. The project culminated in an exhibition of the 365 soiled napkins sewn together in chronological order in the form of an interlocking, two-spiral 100-foot walk-in structure hanging from the gallery ceiling.
The sculpture was accompanied by a limited edition book in which a photograph of each soiled napkin is accompanied by a detailed list of ingredients. Elaborate three-course meals are boiled down to a scientific index, leaving the taste and visual image of the meal up to the viewer's imagination. The artist simultaneously collected 365 6 x 6 -inch paper lunch napkins, which she used to dab her mouth after her daily morning green juice. These paper napkins are arranged in twelve framed calendar formations, creating a visual record of time passing, much like a prisoner keeping track of time by drawing lines on the cell wall. Both pieces are tactile recordings of a daily performance, and in speaking about the months-long process, Wawrzyniak says: "I felt like I was sharing my meals with the public every day and made a conscious effort to be creative in my choice of ingredients. It was like having a daily dinner party. It becomes a tactile self-portrait, representing a year of my life recorded through the food that nourished me."
Furthermore, also included in the Feed exhibition were two small-scale sculptures: a casting of the negative space of the inside of the artist's mouth out of edible golden candy and the hollow of her abdomen out of confectionery gum paste. Like the stains left over from meals on the napkins these pieces are negative imprints of a living, breathing body.
In her Smell Me exhibition at envoy enterprises, New York in fall 2012, Wawrzyniak created an installation reflecting a year-long project where she acted as both investigator and subject exploring and capturing her biological essence. Working with a research team of Hunter College Chemistry students: Paul Kozlowski, Charles Paszkowski, and Paul Tewfik, [1] under the guidance of Professor Donna McGregor, the artist underwent multiple experiments to collect aromatic elements from her body. She was subject to rigorous sessions to extract the concentrated essence of her sweat, tears, and hair to create an olfactory-based self-portrait that would engage visitors in a visceral form of communication without visuality as primary form.
In order to fully immerse the installation space with the scent of her bodily aromas, Wawrzyniak collaborated with the renowned professional perfumer Yann Vasnier of Givaudan and scent director Dawn Goldworm of 12.29 on synthetically reconstituting the organic essences for diffusion. These aromas were released inside a specially designed scent chamber into which visitors entered to partake in a solitary experience. A limited edition of the original organic essences were displayed in tear shaped chemistry vials as well as three candles that were made of paraffin that was scraped off Wawrzyniak's body then melted into 250 ml chemistry beakers.
In an interview with New York Times Magazine, Wawrzyniak explains, "In today's society we do everything we can to mask the natural scent of our bodies, thus forgoing an ancient form of animal communication. I wanted to isolate these primal human essences and deliver them in an environment devoid of other sensual distractions. The piece represents the true essence of a woman - free of visual prejudice."
In 2014 she expanded the Smell Me olfactory self-portrait concept by exposing it to the wider public through guerilla advertising. The resultant piece, Eau De M, which consisted of the artist's sweat essence delivered by way of a magazine scent-strip fragrance advertisement, appeared as a double-sided insert in the full print run of the May 2014 issue of Harper's Bazaar. The advertisement became a vehicle for spreading her essence, letting the mass market consume her artwork unwittingly.
In 2011, Wawyrzyniak released Chocolate, a 9-and-a-half minute performance video in which the artist's face is slowly submerged in 16 gallons of chocolate syrup.
In November 2010, she contributed to 4 Sale, a collaboration of four female artists exploring conceptions of eroticism using themselves as the subjects. [2] Wawrzyniak's contribution was a photo series of the four artists naked except for a camera, and a video of the four applying lipstick first conventionally to their lips and then in deranged fashion to the rest of their faces. [2] In a review of the show, Artinfo described Wawrzyniak as owing "an allegiance both to the vamping of pinup girls and straightforward commercial portraiture", and praised the project as a "serious, well-crafted, yet approachable work that isn't afraid to handle sexuality with a mix of humor, drama, and the occasional dash of mysticism". [2] W magazine commented that Wawrzyniak "explores femininity with both brutality and warmth". [3]
In 2009 Wawrzyniak performed Ketchup, in which she stood blind folded as four 10-year-old boys armed with water guns filled with ketchup fired at her as she stood against a gallery wall. The video was later projected over the ketchup splattered wall with only the artist visible accompanied by audio of the boys voices. It was described by Walter Robinson of Artnet as being "like Lord of the Flies, but without the protective distance of fiction. " [4]
Wawrzyniak's work has been covered in The New York Times , New York , Newsweek , The Huffington Post , NRC Handelsblad , Garage Magazine , Vice , and The Wall Street Journal .
Wawrzyniak's work has appeared in exhibitions, both collective and solo, since 2003. [5]
David Michael Wojnarowicz ( VOY-nə-ROH-vitch was an American painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter/recording artist, and AIDS activist prominent in the East Village art scene. He incorporated personal narratives influenced by his struggle with AIDS as well as his political activism in his art until his death from the disease in 1992.
Mary Leonora Carrington was a British-born surrealist painter and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the women's liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s.
Ryan Johnson is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. His sculptures are "made from a variety of materials, among them wood, medical casting tape and sheet metal," and they have been described as having "strange spatial compressions, surreal displacements and quasi-Futurist illusions of movement."
K8 Hardy is an American artist and filmmaker. Hardy's work spans painting, sculpture, video, and photography and her work has been exhibited internationally at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, Tensta Konsthalle, Karma International, and the Dallas Contemporary. Hardy’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. She is a founding member of the queer feminist artist collective and journal LTTR. She lives and works in New York, New York.
Judith Shea is an American sculptor and artist, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1948. She received a degree in fashion design at Parsons School of Design in 1969 and a BFA in 1975. This dual education formed the basis for her figure based works. Her career has three distinct phases: The use of cloth and clothing forms from 1974 to 1981; Hollow cast metal clothing-figure forms from 1982 until 1991; and carved full-figure statues made of wood, cloth, clay, foam and hair beginning in 1990 to present.
Allyson Vieira is an American artist living and working in New York City, New York. She is primarily known for her sculptural works and drawings. She was born in Massachusetts in 1979. Vieira studied art at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2001, and studied sculpture at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College, receiving her Master of Fine Arts in 2009. Vieira is represented by Laurel Gitlen Gallery in New York City. Vieira's drawings were published in Untitled Book by Evil Twin Publications.
Gayil Nalls is an American interdisciplinary artist and theorist living in New York City and Hudson Valley, New York. Her artistic practice originates in philosophical investigations of personal and collective sensory experiences, memory and identity, and often include the relationship of these experiences to disappearing ecologies. She is an influential contributor to the aesthetics of crowds and human massing. Her multimedia work frequently unites scientific and technological approaches to art-making, exploring the boundaries between the two.
Colette Justine, better known as Colette Lumiere, is a multimedia artist born in Tunisia-and later naturalized American. She is well known since the seventies for her pioneering work in performance art, street art, and photographic tableau vivant. She is also known for her work exploring male and female gender roles, use of guises and personas, and for soft fabric environments, where she often appears as the central element.
World Sensorium is a natural and inclusive world scent, a work of olfactory art by interdisciplinary artist Gayil Nalls, who is based in New York. A large-scale conceptual project and social sculpture, the world scent comprises the most culturally significant scents of 225 countries combined proportionally, according to the statistical population data of the year 2000. World Sensorium has been recognized by UNESCO and the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities as a global peace project and has been internationally exhibited in large public events, museums, and galleries since its creation in 1999.
Patricia Cronin is a New York-based feminist cross-disciplinary artist. Since the early-1990s, Cronin has garnered international attention for her photographs, paintings and sculptures that address contemporary human rights issues. Cronin's conceptual artistic practice transits across many aesthetic platforms addressing social justice issues of gender, sexuality and class, including: lesbian visibility, feminist art history, marriage equality and international rights of women. She subverts traditional art images and forms in a wide range of two and three-dimensional time-honored artists' materials and breathes new life into these images and forms by injecting her specific political content. Her critically acclaimed statue, "Memorial To A Marriage", is the first and only Marriage Equality monument in the world. A 3-ton Carrara marble mortuary sculpture of her life partner and herself was made before gay marriage was legal in the U.S., and has been exhibited widely across the country and abroad. Cronin began her career working for the Anne Frank Stichting (Foundation)Archived 2015-10-25 at the Wayback Machine in Amsterdam installing the traveling exhibition "Anne Frank in the World" in Europe and the U.S. Giving presence to female absence is a consistent thread that runs through and connects each body of work.
Dawn Clements (1958–2018) was an American contemporary artist and educator. She was known for her large scale, panoramic drawings of interiors that were created with many different materials in a collage-style. Her primary mediums were sumi ink and ballpoint pen on small to large scale paper panels. In order to complete a drawing she cut and pasted paper, editing and expanding the composition to achieve the desired scale. Her completed drawings reveal her working process through the wrinkles and folds evident in the paper. She described her work as “a kind of visual diary of what [she] see[s], touch[es], and desire[s]. As I move between the mundane empirical spaces of my apartment and studio, and the glamorous fictions of movies, apparently seamless environments are disturbed through ever-shifting points of view.”
Anicka Yi is a conceptual artist whose work lies at the intersection of fragrance, cuisine, and science. She is known for installations that engage the senses, especially the sense of smell, and for her collaborations with biologists and chemists. Yi lives and works in New York City.
Sharon Gold is an American artist and associate professor of painting at Syracuse University. Gold's artwork has been installed at MoMA PS1, Dia Art Foundation, Carnegie Mellon University, Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Everson Museum of Art, and Princeton University Art Museum. She was a fellow at MacDowell Colony. Gold's work has been reviewed by Arthur Danto, Donald Kuspit, Ken Johnson, and Stephen Westfall in a variety of publications from Artforum to the New York Times, New York Magazine, Arts Magazine, Art News, and many others. She also taught at Princeton University, Pratt Institute, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Francisco Art Institute, and the Tyler School of Art. Gold received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and wrote for Re-View Magazine, M/E/A/N/I/N/G/S, and Artforum. Her artwork spans across minimalism, monochromatic abstraction, geometric abstraction, and representational painting and is conceptually informed by structuralism, existential formalism, and feminist theory.
Soi Park is a Korean artist working in the photographic medium.
Susanna Heller was a painter, who lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York. Born in New York City and raised in Montreal, she studied art in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was a landed immigrant in Canada until 2006. She exhibits her work regularly in New York and in Toronto. She is known equally in Canada and the United States for her contributions to contemporary art as a painter. Her work is most well known for depictions of cities, primarily New York City.
Marion Wilson is an American artist whose mixed media installations have gained critical attention.
Janet Henry is a visual artist based in New York City.
Rachel Farmer is an American artist. She is primarily known for her ceramic sculpture and installations. Farmer's work explores Mormon history from a feminist and queer perspective, and is informed by her roots in the Utah area.
Caitlin Cherry is an African-American painter, sculptor, and educator.
Clara Ursitti is a Canadian-Italian artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. She was born in North Bay, Ontario in 1968.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
