Piecing Together
relief print and paper-cut
35" x 34" installation
2016
$875
“The thing we call a place is the intersection of many changing forces passing
through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a fixed location.”
— Rebecca Solnit
The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness
My artwork examines actual and constructed memory, especially as it related to my upbringing in Poland and immigration to the United States. My recollections of the places I occupied in Poland and in my initial years in Chicago, the city I immigrated to, serve as the whirling, mixing, dissolving, and explod-ing forces that Rebecca Solnit references in The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness.
Memory is liminal. Remembering a place is not an act of recollecting the actual place but our last memory of that place. Therefore, my work is often an abstraction of a place, space, building, folktale, or event that had a lasting impression. I use images that reference my father’s elaborate gardens, my mother’s colorful textiles, the Slavic folktale of the Baba Jaga, and the majestic skyscrapers of Chicago. Images repeat, change direction, and dominance. All of these actions mimic the actions of memory.