Janusz Wrobel
In an act of seeing
Projects.
Identifying the needs in our lives, and ways of sense making, is a matter of choice. My essential are in every breath, water and food I need. An adult choice is knowing the content of it, and how secure is the supply.
The supply is an outcome of interactions between two worlds. The first one is we all came from. The second is our interpretations of the first one, and our sense making. Can the means of One World be won or bought?
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Projects Overview
If reality is a persistent illusion, I choose it at any time over fictions or fantasies. Peeling one like an onion, getting rewarded by discoveries of hidden structures, draws me in. It is more practical, never boring. And a chance to gauge what is the common ground.
It's my way of navigating the world of growing, mutually excluding, contradictions. A world of growing consequences of what meant to be our lives improving “solutions”. The fixes to satisfy our indulgence, each upon the next ones at the expense of our lives support systems.
Encounters summarize five projects with a single goal. As our social structures and relationships are being challenged everywhere, each
of my five projects hints at ways to face our fast-changing world.
The water's edge was where people liked to meditate. Our weakness or transcendence, our drives to explore, exploit, conquer what lies ahead and beyond, seeking welcoming space. It has been about us, "here and now", how to fit in webs of Life bearing cruelties of the physical or human worlds. Where could people's attention be now?
While there, I reflect on living cells within my body, functionally aware of all others. Each self-contained unit of Life suspended in calm water, in harmony of unifying coexistence, purpose and connection. All of It makes harder to accept the inescapable limits of all Life defined by properties of a molecule I can't even see. And the processes in our social framework that are making us oblivious to these limits. Finding ways of transcendence through escapes from it.
We live in a world of relationships shaping our identities, as well as thoughts, behaviour and lifestyles. The workplaces expose us to the norms of social structures requiring our subordination to employers' goals and their metrics. That might spill over our personal lives, where the web of relationships sprouts from different grounds and principles. Keeping them separate might be a lifetime challenge.
I lived within many social structures and ideologies, their outcomes and consequences. Each time, the alignment of core values helped with the adaptation. And to relay on more intuitive references, like primordial archetypes of relationships developed along the human path of cognitive evolution. A walk in woods always helped me to restore balance in my relationships. And making sense about values they brought to my life, and why they had, or why not.
I often felt like living misplaced between two split worlds. The urban world offered all around escapes the mundane into fantasy grounds. Theatres, books, galleries, shopping, exotic trips, news, all highly rewarding. The second world, that I was often passing by on my white-water canoe adventures, appeared tediously unattractive. The endless stretches of scruffy, impenetrable vegetation. Both worlds that were quite oblivious of another, indulging in separation.
Once stranded there and bored, I started paying attention to the web of relationships on the grounds. And I discover my Petri dish of giant scale, assembling the essential founding blocks of both worlds. Worlds once to be as one. I saw in it a new garden of Eden, where science laws, once learned but forgotten, were visibly practiced.
Landscape, as an art genre, was characterized as an objective image of a land, inviting viewers to populate it with their own stories. For many decades now, it is a broad range of their authors' visions focused on forms and styles more than land itself. The "historical" works therefore, have still the receptive audience. In photography, it is now a free-for-all web marketplace of "landscaped" images.
Year after year, I go out to embrace the spaces of history, meaning, and Life's tiresome work. Often just to contemplate echoes of friendships once forged there, swarms of insects and birds that vanished along old story lines. And my hopes of taking there my grandchildren to forge our own stories.
All quiet on Nature's front. The silence of Life is deafening.
Intermission - Under pending revisions
I use photography for its fusion of credible documentary and interpretation qualities. It imposes on me the cognitive discipline advancing each project. They are linked by living world processes that create molecular order from matter's natural chaotic state. My focus was interactions between biological and physical worlds that set limits of biological existence.
As the world population multiplied in my lifetime, so each individual consumption, wastes and pollution generation. My descendants' outlook depends on the outcome of all environmental changes. Stopping and reversing them hinges on their erratic interpretations by the world's human populations. I investigated the state of them in one of countless urban setting, the city of Hamilton, Ontario.
I abandoned plans to exhibit my work for valid reasons.
I am ready, though, to cooperate with curators or other artists around exhibition projects with coherent vision, adequate visual material, space, and defined ideas about promoting it.
I have many artworks exhibition ready, and ideas about the support of multi-screen presentation.
