HANNA HOYNE ANTOINETTE WYSOCKI Musings
13 April 2010 - 22 May 2010
Australian sculptor Hanna Hoyne is concerned with the embodied experience of art objects and creates off-beat and surreal mixed media sculptures and installations. Hoyne’s output is diverse, but at the heart of her work is an abiding interest in the human condition and our attempts at defining our conscious world.
Hoyne is perhaps best known for her Protectornauts series. In these large installation pieces the artist creates astronaut-type suits from Asian ceremonial papers. Despite their delicate medium, the suits are both commanding and conceptually potent. The ephemeral protection suits protect the psyche, the heart and the soul, not the body. They are installed in space without the body present within them. The visual impact of the works, and others like it, can be overwhelming.
Her smaller scale pieces, Mind Organs, conceptually compliment her larger work. The works are created initially with cardboard and plastic and rendered with fbreglass, glue and plaster and finished with faux gold leaf, taken from the ritual Chinese ‘joss’ papers. The sculpture seems at once alien and familiar; monumental and delicate. In her works Hoyne reflects the feats and struggles of the human imagination. In the Astronaut series in particular, she considers the way in which we deal with the enormity of science and contentious issues such as genetic engineering.
Hoyne has exhibited widely in solo and group shows in Australia and is a Helen Lempriere Sculpture Award Finalist. Hoyne was recently awarded a PhD in sculpture from the Australian National University. During her PhD and her masters and BA degrees, she has undertaken exchange scholarships in Seoul, Kyoto, Paris and an artist residency in Germany.
American artist Antoinette Wysocki is an expressionistic painter who employs mixed media on organic materials. Since 1998, Wysocki has removed herself from the confines of stretched canvas and instead has turned her attentions to working on rag. Paper allows the artist to play with absorption rates and its characteristic malleable quality retains the immediacy of drawing - which has always been the touchstone for Wysocki’s painting.
The artist has developed a process of combining various materials, chance, control and analysis in her pieces. In each of her works, Wysocki creates a balance between the media and absorption rate of the surface, so that the various materials interact, binding or refracting from each other and the paper itself. Each work starts with gestures and washes, then moves into controlled brush strokes with detail. When the painting reaches a comfortable finished point, it is then time to indulge in the materials. The goal is to balance raw, untouched paper in some areas with highly saturated color in others, sometimes consciously, others by chance. One misused layer of material can alter the piece beyond repair, inspire to the next step or become the focus of the piece itself.
As such, the works teeter between governance and circumstance: the artist organically alters, enhances and even erases shapes. The works are introspective and deeply expressive, close inspection across a body of her work reveals a diary of inscribed messages and ghost-like imagery, recording the artist’s process of reconciling the imagery with her psyche.
Antoinette Wysocki received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and has shown widely in galleries such in New York, San Francisco, Sacramento, Seattle, New Mexico and Washington D.C. In 2007 she was nominated for next emerging artist by GLAAD in New York City and was awarded an artist’s grant for a artist program through the Santa Fe Art Institute.
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