Exquisite Variants- OVERLAP
“Exquisite Variants” is an exhibition with individual pen and ink drawings by Maggie Nowinski, mixed-media sculptures by Alicia Renadette, along with mixed-media drawings, and an installation created by both artists working collaboratively.
All living beings must continuously adapt to survive. Sometimes growth causes puzzling transformations and creates strange and unsettling shapes. Both artists’ works are informed by documentation of biological morphology and imagined embodiments of ambivalence and bodily sensations. For their ongoing collaboration, the two artists merge, morph, and layer imagery from their practices, of drawing and sculpture, to create novel biomorphic forms that respond to their fascination with physical expressions of resilience in the plant and animal worlds.
Maggie laboriously renders intricate drawings and prints that show writhing masses of muscle tissue and skeletal fragments competing and converging with wriggling tendrils and sprouting leaves. Alicia, meanwhile, composes abstract entangled sculptures from consumer detritus and orphaned domestic objects. Her excessive compositions evoke tangled nests and miniature ecosystems in flux.
Their joint process is a visual feedback loop / petri dish in which each artist contributes images and objects from their individual bodies of work, to be reproduced and re-contextualized by one another. They make drawings and sculptures inspired by one another's work, photograph these derivative works, and add the digital images to a shared computer folder so they may be printed and hand-manipulated into collage elements. As the artists create new composite imagery, they document it and repeat the process to amass a collection of mutated and replicated forms. This novel imagery serves as raw material for creating collage compositions and free-form immersive installations. These collaborative pieces are passed back and forth several times, allowing the artists to commune with and contribute to the growth of one another’s forms.