Exquisite Variants - Red Mill Gallery, VSC
This collaboration envisions tension and harmony between natural and manufactured environments; interior and exterior worlds; authorship and interpretation of images; and representation on two and three dimensional planes.
Within her practice of drawing and printmaking, Maggie Nowinski laboriously renders animal/botanical hybrid specimens created through observation, memory and improvisation. Alicia Renadette, meanwhile, scavenges for consumer detritus and orphaned domestic items to compose sculptures which often mimic ecosystems in states of flux.
Recognizing such thematic confluences as biological adaptation and resilience within their separate bodies of work, the two began what is now an on-going collaboration in which their divergent approaches offer one another a new realm of language and imagery. The process is a visual feedback loop in which both artists contribute images and objects from their own work as both source material and inspiration to be reinterpreted, reproduced and re-contextualized. For example, a three-dimensional object, by Renadette, is used as a study for a drawing, by Nowinski, which is in turn photographed, printed out and drawn on top of, by Renadette, which is then incorporated into a collage element after being layered onto the original drawing by Nowinski, and so on.
Since COVID-19, the artists have mostly worked on elements separately- uploading images to a shared drive. During this time, it is significant that from across state borders, they were able to build a world in which they can momentarily lose themselves and find each other.