VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

Galveston Arts Center is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work by Galveston-based artist Kamila Szczesna titled fleeting. The exhibition will open during the November 26th ArtWalk and remain on view through January 15, 2012. Curator Clint Willour will lead a gallery talk with the artist beginning at 6:30 pm during ArtWalk. The event is free and open to the public.

Ideas of life, science, and time are recurring themes in Szczesna’s two-dimensional and three-dimensional works. Her abstract ink wash drawings on paper are large-scale, organic forms and anatomically-suggestive, life-sized gestures that could also be interpreted as something one might only see through the lens of a microscope. Similar shapes are echoed in the drawings layered within custom light boxes. Specimen-laden Petri dishes, amoeba-like forms and DNA code become scientific portraits of anonymous individuals. The artist is interested in portraying the “essence of life”—the biological basis for existence, which exists in a constant state of motion and flux. Her images reference the fluidity from which all life eventually becomes formed.

Amorphous, bulbous three-dimensional shapes are encased under glass cloches kept beneath black velvet drapes, simultaneously conveying mystery, preciousness, and perhaps an element of danger. Szczesna coated each blobby mass in agar, the gelatinous medium used to grow bacterial cultures, and then licked them, allowing a biological “portrait” of herself to grow within the controlled environment. “Everything is matter built with tirelessly moving particles,” notes the artist. “Nothing is stagnant, everything is moving, and time, as related to the essence of life, is fleeting.”

A native of Wroclaw, Poland, Szczesna moved to Galveston in 2002 when her husband was hired as a molecular scientist at the University of Texas Medical Branch. She received a master’s degree from the Academy of Fine Arts, Wroclaw, in 1999. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including shows at Lawndale Art Center, Houston; Keramikmuseum Westerwald, Germany; Glass and Ceramics Gallery, Wroclaw; and the Museum of International Ceramic Art, Denmark. She has recently had a solo exhibition at Wagner Sousa Modern Art, Galveston

Galveston Arts Center is operating in a temporary downtown location on the corner of Market and 25th Streets. The exhibition gallery and selections from GAC’s retail gallery, ArtWorks, are open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, from 11 am to 5 pm, and Sunday from noon to 5 pm. Admission is free at all times. A flyer listing all ArtWalk participants with times and locations can be downloaded at www.contemporaryartgalveston.org.

Photo Captions:
Kamila Szczesna
it no. 8, 2011
Acrylic ink on watercolor paper
51 x 108 inches
Courtesy the artist and Wagner Sousa Modern Art, Galveston

Kamila Szczesna
flux no. 5, 2011 (detail above, full image below)
Laser copies of scientific data describing human DNA, images of bacterial cultures harvested from the artist’s saliva, images of the artist’s sculptures and ink drawings, Dura-lar, Plexiglas, and florescent light
17 x 29, x 6 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Wagner Sousa Modern Art, Galveston

Kamila Szczesna
flux no. 5 (detail), 2011
Mixed media
17 x 29, x 6 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Wagner Sousa Modern Art, Galveston