Jowita Wyszomirska: The Distance of Blue

In the summer of 2017, Jowita Wyszomirska was invited to study glaciers at the Wrangell Artist Residency in McCarthy, Alaska. The body of work she has produced from this experience is the subject of her forthcoming exhibition at gallery neptune & brown opening on January 26, 2019. For several years Wyszomirska has used weather data from NASA's satellite imagery for creative inspiration. She transforms the imagery she collects to reflect the effects of climate change with regard to freak winter storms, extreme weather changes, and highly fluctuating temperatures. The transformed image becomes the basis for sketching, cutting, and layering large sheets of mylar to create installations and mixed media drawings.

She has written about her most recent work:
“I am captivated by the motion and stillness of Nature and its unseen forces. The most recent body of work is based on my experience of the Root Glacier located in the Wrangell St. Elias National Park, Alaska. There, I spent several days walking on the ice surface exploring the hills and crevices of its enormous shape. Glaciers appear fixed and unchanging; however, they are continuously on the move. I was grounded on the surface of something ancient that is moving, churning ground, melting away. In contrast to the firm glacier occupying the landscape, my body felt short-lived. Yet the rapid melting of glaciers and intense environmental changes in the region make the Arctic itself a fragile organism on the verge of extinction. As the ice melts, its ancient memory fades away. Memory is narrow, incomplete. Over time, my recollections slowly subside. The color blue signifies the distance between ‘here’ and ‘there’ connecting to what is continuously lost. I aim for the viewer to experience layered cartographies of our environments melding us across the physical boundaries of our disparate worlds to celebrate and grieve what we are failing to preserve.”

Wyszomirska was born in Poland and emigrated with her family to Chicago in the early 1990s. She has a BFA from Illinois State University and an MFA from the University of Maryland. She has exhibited nationally in solo and two-person exhibitions. Her honors include residency fellowships at the Jentel Foundation, Wyoming; Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Nebraska; and the International School of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture, Italy.