A Mouth that Might Sing
Gallery 1 & 2
27 April – May 27, 2012
Opening reception: Friday, 27 April. 7-9pm
Pierogi is delighted to present a third one-person exhibition of Ryan Mrozowski’s recent work. The exhibition title references the potential for something to happen, or the ability for a static image to feel animated or potent, and Mrozowski’s interest in transforming the meaning of source material. This exhibition consists of paintings, drawings, video, and several found image light sculptures. Working in these varied approaches, Mrozowski explores the way formal digressions can warp and shift the symbolic meaning of representational imagery. By overlapping faces, cutting away, folding, cropping, obscuring imagery, among other techniques, he creates a sort of banal surrealism. He works with the images, whittling them away, wearing them down like a bar of soap.
In several sculptures, a single found book page is floated in front of a light bulb. The pages were collected over several years and have images printed on both sides that serendipitously create a third hybrid image when exposed to the light source. These previously hidden collages inform a series of paintings in which still life and portraiture are collapsed on the picture plane. Mrozowski is interested in using generalized imagery, stand-ins or surrogates as test subjects for his formal paint explorations. Faces, audiences, plants, flowers, birds, dogs, pieces of tape from his studio floor, are all employed to investigate themes of enlightenment, technology, magic, illusion, and perception.
A short animated film, Palimpsest, was created by cutting and layering scenes from the film Night of the Living Dead on top of one another to create an infinite loop. The film plays forward and backward simultaneously and serves as a jumping off point for his interest in bringing together incongruent ideas and images, chance encounters and disparate symbols, within a painting practice.