Izabela Żółcińska

Pienkow Gallery is situated in the unconventional setting of a medical office building across from Kmart on Kingston Pike; it’s also the home of an unusual international art connection between Knoxville
and Poland.

The gallery is the brainchild of avid art patron Dr. Marek Pienkowski, whose office is located in the gallery’s building, and its origins are tied to the University of Tennessee printmaking department —  professor Beauvais Lyons received a 2002 Fulbright Scholarship that sent him to lecture at the Academy of Fine Art in Poznan, Poland, and a print exchange exhibit and a student exchange program developed from this opportunity. Both schools assembled 50 prints from students and faculty, with the works showcased over several years as traveling exhibits to various academic galleries on both sides of
the Atlantic.

Pienkowski assisted Lyons with this first event and since 2002, two UT printmaking majors are exchanged one month each fall semester for two Poznan students, immersing themselves in the programs at each school. Students, professors and art are shuttled back and forth on a regular basis, with work from Poznan by students and faculty exhibited at UT’s Ewing Gallery and at Fluorescent Gallery on North Central.

Pienkowski, however, uses the open two-story lobby of the West Knox Plaza office building to hang exhibits that he arranges himself. The most recent exhibit is the work of award-winning Polish artist Izabela Żółcińska, a graduate of the Academy of Arts in Poznan. Though trained as a painter, she also works with installations, photography and animation. One of the unifying themes in all her work is the spatial relationships at work on a monochrome surface, and the result when the color red is introduced. It sounds vague and a bit conceptual, but her work is often figurative, though abstractly approached. One installation in Poland placed at least a dozen loaves of bread, all painted red, in a metal shop where almost all the equipment was painted black. It was a simple concept that totally transformed the environment.

The Plus Minus Project was originally an hour-long video animation exhibited in two galleries in Poland in 2007. For the Knoxville exhibit, Żółcińska’s first in the United States, she pulls a few dozen stills from the video and makes transitional groupings of interrelated images. All the images are uniform in size, and all are printed on fusible transparency film adhered to Plexiglas. The Plexiglas is hung by monofilament line tied to holes drilled into the Plexiglas, and then tied to the end of long nails driven into the wall, which allows them to hover an inch or two away from the wall. This placement enables the work to create shadows that add another dimension to the imagery. The shadows, created by ambient light and exhibit spaces, change throughout the day, varying in color and intensity.

The images are both photographic and digital in origin, and partially figurative. The constant is the human figure, blurred and silhouetted as if seen with a bright light in the background. The mostly armless figures are all in a seated position, but lacking the presence of a chair. Sometimes they are black, sometimes red or blue, while the atmosphere surrounding them runs from a virtual fog to clearly rendered cityscapes. They are overlapped in one grouping with horizontal lines, in another with round red orbs. The images in each carefully planned grouping transition with blurs and graduated compositions to indicate movement.

Żółcińska says her vision for the project was to create a fluid world where shapes would flow into two kinds of motion. The motions describe the changes in bodily interaction with the environment over the course of time. The horizontal compositions denote passivity and are intended to evoke a negative atmosphere. The vertical compositions are intended to be active and positive. Combined, they display both magnetic attraction and repulsive force. The series with the red orb is the most visually dynamic, as the orb changes in its intensity over a series of nine images, almost like the phases of the moon.

The entire Plus Minus Project is at once scientific and mysterious. The media Żółcińska uses to transform video animation to an equally arresting still installation preserves the feel of animation, and by itself is captivating. I still crave the idea of seeing the original video, and though there is a catalog that shows long stretches of the animation, it is merely a tease for the full work. Having the video on a portable DVD player on continuous loop along with the still images would be a treat. I’m hoping Żółcińska uploads it to YouTube.