DRAWING CONTINUOUS
Walls by GOSIA WLODARCZAK-SARNECKA
12th April - 5th May, 2002 @ GALLERY EAST
Reviewed by Jan Altmann

Walls are everywhere, especially inside and around art galleries. They include and they exclude. Symbolically, they convey various messages of cultural significance. They can comprise part of a house – one's private dwelling place, a house of collective wisdom, or a cosmic space into which one enters in order to re-emerge and regenerate. Walls often symbolize the idea of a threshold. As such they are both barriers between spaces and passages from one space to another. Thresholds are the meeting places of the private and the public, the conscious and the unconscious, the natural and the supernatural. Walls redefine space just as rites of passage redefine time.

Gosia's exhibition of drawings is about time, space and the complex relationships between different times and different spaces. It incorporates the walls of the gallery as well as the 'walls' of canvas, which comprise the art works themselves. The canvasses represent small, private occupations of time or space. The walls behind represent time and space as universal or public realities. The interactions of the two 'walls' suggest ways in which personal times and spaces emerge from the universal, and are changed by it. At the same time universal space and time are also changed by the personal.

West Wall is about past and present – how memories from the past are contained within the feelings and experiences of the present. The past and the present continually engage in redefinition and reconstruction, each changing the other. The gallery wall behind is the public present where the viewer and the artist meet. The background of the drawings refers to the past on which the artist inscribes her present. The drawing on the sides of the frames link the memories of the past with the constantly moving panels of the present. The colours and the lines work with and against each other as a dramatic enactment of the defining process.

East Wall is about power relations and how they change with time. Utilitarianism and utopianism are the ideals towards which human time is directed. The lines are uniform and the colours equal, as an indication that democracy and equality can at least be conceptualized. However, irregular relationships emerge to reveal the inevitable inequalities of human society. There are no wall spaces visible between the panels, as they move together to assert their own dominance. Human spaces become filled with power struggles, and universals are blocked out.

North Wall is about the relationship between time and space. Sixty days of drawing hang in a space on a wall. The work is called Present Continuous 60/2.5=24. This refers to the fact that for 60 days Gosia sat drawing in her bathroom and the result was 24 panels, each of which took 2.5 days to complete. Light and shade, space and density emerge and submerge as perception and sensation take visible form. No sooner is form identifiable than it slips back into the space from whence it came. The surface of the drawing becomes both the expression of private space and the means by which that space is made visible. Even plumbing becomes meaningful as the lines constantly form and reform indicating that time and space continue indefinitely.

Gosia's drawings are artforms that conceal the fact that they are artforms. Surrounding space and passing time become absorbed into the drawing process. Both the process, and the product, then become expressions of the way that time and space both construct human existence and are constructed by it.

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