STREAMING
Cyanotype tapestry drawings – excerpts from a large-scale installation
by Maggie Nowinski, 2013
Streaming the 25th Hour combined current finished and in-progress art works intersecting thought patterns, tempos of time movement, and perceptions of choice. Many current works were informed by recent personal experiences of loss. As part of the installation, she performed tasks expressing facets of her creative practice. The works capture tensions concerning this process and the practicalities of daily life, time and place. Within this are observations related to the arrival of ideas[1], attempts and failures at mindfulness, and personal desire.
Intended to be generative, Streaming the 25th Hour was part residency, part installation, and part performance. During primarily scheduled times throughout the course of the exhibition, Nowinski will be exorcized what she called her conceptual struggle with binary time enemy. She allotted time durations in and near the installation space to facilitate visceral and visual acts of mindful creative activity aiming to illustrate the difficulties of accessing creative process in the context of a busy schedule. Time slots were be dictated by multiple kitchen timers and analogue clocks.
This exhibition offered an opportunity for the artist to attempt to recreate the pace of everyday life; how fragmented and disruptive qualities seem to infringe on creative practice and mindful experience. Internalization of invented and perceived systems of logic were explored in relation to process through manipulation of materials and actions. Performative-process creations were designed for the artists to engage in one activity for a period of time until it was time to switch to another task.
The 25th Hour represents the extra hour in the day that she longs for, and believes is accessible through an alteration in perception in combination with quality of time spent. Her practices in and near the gallery were an attempt to realize this “25th hour” and to align various inputs and mental processes that are a streaming constant.
A schedule artist followed was accessible to the general public, who were welcome to observe her. Performances were be titled according to a list created at the start; some included durational actions with one or more additional participants. Goals included exorcism through creative exercise, engagement with the element of chance and transformation through learning, being, hearing, breathing, observing and altering.
While this exhibition represented a departure for Nowinski, she continued her practice of presenting a dialogue of works in a variety of media. Viewers observed drawings, video(s), cyanotypes, spontaneous thought map creations, stitches, stitching, ropes, a ladder, sticks and stones, written and typed texts, sounds, clocks, body casts, attempts automatic writing, pushups and additional remnants. She used her voice, a guitar and her recently deceased grandfathers violin.
[1] Concepts for studio projects often emerge uninvited, in spurts during a busy schedule. Int he studio they sometimes branch, have trajectories, or move tangentially prompting new forms and visual manifestations. Many simply wait for attention, scrawled or sketched fast so as not be forgotten.