Maggie Nowinski

A Whole Recollection

This exhibition reflects marking time within an expanded moment.

Nowinski’s *Divoc Daily Drawings are presented on three walls. They are organized chronologically in rows, similar to a calendar, but with eight rows of fifteen drawings on two walls and nine rows on the last. To view them in order one must start at the very top left drawing on the first wall (3/13/2020) and view them left to right as thought reading them, row by row, clockwise wall by wall. This project began on Friday March 13th, 2020 and came to a close on March 14th 2021. A year is a potent unit by which we measure our histories, memories and mark our lives. A year and a day hints at the fact that the seemingly monumental events of 2020 have by no means concluded, in fact we continue to stay sensitive, to process, to learn and to move through our lives, day by day.

The structure of the Daily Drawings allowed for immense freedom in visual expression. The parameters – each drawing on 11” x 14” paper, primarily on Rives BFK, with black and white media for the imagery. With this in place, it was decided anything could be a prompt. From the mundane, to the imagined; the observed botanical bursts of spring, Covid graphs in newspapers, grandma, a photo or poem from a dear friend in lockdown abroad, a photo of another friend’s tonsilitis, Black Lives Matter, aerosol mist, notions of isolation and unity, cairns to gain a sense of location and an idea of direction, internalized capitalism, and on and on. The pages accumulated, piled and lived layered together, in boxes, until they came out in full display here.

Also included in this exhibition is Be Spilled, My Heart an installation of over 160 wHoles. These drawings are on double sided on canvas and range individually from 8ft to 8 inches in diameter. The wHoles are a part of a personal visual language that has continued to be a part of my work over the last few years. Ambiguous in their origin and far ranging in scale they are based on the ubiquitous archetypal circle and are intended to evoke multiple associations. Both evading definition, they are at once recognizable or familiar and yet abstract. Together they create a topography as they crawl up or recede from the wall, regenerate or die, spill out into or pull back from the room onto the floor. The intention is for viewers to experience a kind of cathedral reaction upon entering and encountering the installation – gazes directed upward to the top of the wall almost 30’ high.

* A Footnote:

Divoc is Covid backwards, reflecting looking back to the year when the pandemic hit. There are multiple meanings to be found online (check it out), although sources are quite scattered, with varying degrees of interpretation. One meaning comes from Latin suggesting God’s Act. Another, more apt association, suggested that the root “voc” meant “to call” and “di” referred to divided – or “voc” as in voce or voice - all reflecting the divided political landscape of these times.

(* installation and Daily Divoc drawing photos by John Polak - Easthampton, MA)

photopolymer intaglio

Ongoing series of drawings from 2019-current, responding to the process of direct, imagined or remembered observation with relation to daily life, scientific method and somatic absorption. Informed by direct observation, sketches and photographing botanical specimens, botanical and skeletal discoveries on walks and imagined hybrids. (series on view: 22”x30, 11”x17”, 26” x 40” pen and ink, gouache on heavyweight Fabriano/Arches)

Installation shots of Somaflora at the Newport Art museum

click: SEE TOUR/Artist Talk

Maggie Nowinski’s drawings combine the sensibilities of scientific illustrations with continuous contour doodling and, most recently, stark black silhouettes to create and examine complex systems: somatic, psychological, and social. Working with layers of intricate pen and ink line work, she gives form to imagined specimens, which often appear as plant-animal hybrids, of which Nowinski says, “As they emerge I am aware that the lived experience in my body is vast and enigmatic and I think about the interplay of resilience and ache in these specimens – triumphant adaptations and self-sufficient, sometimes toxic, systems.”

11” x 14 Rives BFK - India ink, pen and ink, acrylic, graphite.
Project in process. Year long daily project started Friday the 13th of March, 2020 as quarantine began. The drawings started as a way to make visible what I could not see, the process initially intended to be coronavirus drawings. As the days and weeks passed the drawings remained grounded in their initial intention while also expanding in meaning, scope and personal function. Source imagery is derived from a response to objects I observe daily on walks , botanical specimens, imagined microscopic tendencies, and photographs and poems shared with me by friends and collaborators.

The entire collection of drawings will be included as part of a large solo exhibition at the von Auesperg Gallery in Sept 2021.

contemporary drawing, daily drawing practice, coronavirus drawing project, drawing installation

(drawings photographed by John Polak http://www.johnpolakphotography.com/)

Drawn wHole solo exhibition Real Art Ways, Harford CT OCtober 2018-January 2019 click here - review here

My current body of work evolves from an exploration of personal, collective and empathetic anxieties.

The w(H)ole is an image I began to draw in the summer of 2016 and has since been a recurring image. In contrast to the specimen drawings I make, which suggest botanical-human hybrid systems, the w(H)oles are structurally simple forms that reference the specimen’s cellular make-up. They recall many archetypal and ubiquitous orifices in the human body and other forms in nature, the relationship between the individual and the collective, and the physical form of an exhale.

The w(H)oles are a witness to time passing, memories collecting, regrets emerging and my own resilience in the context of this accumulation. They reflect the  paradoxical notion that life can embody transformation and continuation, despite loss and remorse. That entities can thrive, embodying vital moments and growth despite inevitable toxic build-up from our pasts and global realities, situates these forms. We are all empty and full; negotiating impact and adaptation as living bodies inhabiting all the spaces that lie within.

Images From:

Tendere wHoles
William Bizzard Gallery, Springfield College, MA, 2019

DRAWN wHOLE, Real Art Ways, Hartford CT, 2018-2019

524 w(H)oles
Berkshire Art Museum, North Adams MA
original drawings in pen, inks, acrylic on Yupo, 2018

Entropies
MAP Space, Easthampton, MA 2018 

2022: Work in Progress images for performances in fall 2022. Collaboration with performance artist and dancer Michelle Marroquin and dancer Zazie Tobey.

2021/2022: Work in process during a residency at Northampton Center for the Arts through the Distributed Curation program - a collaboration between APE Gallery, School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, and NoHo Center for the Arts - part of an ongoing collaboration with poet/translator María José Giménez.

Maggie Nowinski
Antipyretic Abductions
drawings, installation, sculpture, transparency drawings & digital collage 2013-current
OTC NSAIDS, pen and ink on papers, yupo, polyester drafting film and acetate, Xerox transparencies, digital collage, multi-tiered light box, video, test tubes,vinyl tubing, glass laboratory flasks, testubes, cotton, styrofoam, overhead transparency projector
 

These images refer to a set of ideas relating to the body, over-the-counter medicine, and make believe internal landscapes called organscapes.

            “…abduction is the process of forming explanatory hypotheses. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea”  - Charles Peirce

Antipyretic Abductions is an ongoing project that began in 2013 as part of a larger installation for an exhibition loosely based on the theme of experimentation. Ibuprofen and other NSAIDS have been a staple component in my life and tend to be found in most domestic homes.  The drawings came about after noticing the color stain ibuprofen tables left on my fingers or any surface when encountering moisture. I wondered what they might do when they entered the body – how quickly they dissolve and enter the bloodstream. Simple experiments included adding water and hydrogen peroxide to glass test tubes, through vinyl tubing and onto surfaces holding various forms of over-the-counter pain relievers. Observations were made in the form of photographs, videos, drawings and notations, reminiscent of scientific process but lacking in empirical method; the drawings reflect how observations lead to questions and back.

In the late 19th century, Charles Peirce wrote extensively about various stages regarding the logic of scientific method. One stage, known as abduction, in part describes the stage of an experiment when a hypothesis or theory is being conceptualized. These drawings come out of a process connected to play, formal exploration and an interest in the politics of daily pain, bringing in the possibility for further inquiry. 

Antipyretic Abductions began out of indulgent curiosity, and the desire to immerse in materials, observation and pretend. I became a laboratory and concoctor. While the for-profit political implications of the over-the-counter medication enters the conceptual terrain in this work, this was not at the forefront of my initial interest. More so, the ubiquitous nature of this medication, a cheap form of drawing media even, allowed me to notice its mark making capabilities. I began a series of experiments, a way to enter the studio and observe, while moving through various ways of controlling and relinquishing control over materials - a collaboration between materials and signification, control and arbitrary play.

The drawings have provided the basis for installations, which have incorporated videos, objects, sound, overhead projections, light boxes and sculpture

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.

Plastic water bottles exist in the daily periphery of our environments, like the tap, tap, tapping of a leaking faucet, the ticking of a clock counting down to a dangerous event. As they assimilate into the corners of our environments, we swallow the methods of the bottled water industry that manufacture and advertise their contents using notions of purity and health.

Preoccupied by an awareness of plastic water bottles I started collecting and working with them. Since late 2007 I have been developing a project that explores my relationship with the plastic water phenomenon. Looking at my own discomfort about participating in the world I live in, physically and psychologically, as I continually adjust to the sensation of impending doom that comes from living in today’s world, I explore the internalization of anxiety, the absorption of customary practices as normal and the impact of social and commercial processes on the individual. When I drink bottled water, the process is paradoxical – rejuvenating yet emotionally numbing. Swallowed will culminate in an installation including hundreds of photographs, thousands of plastic water bottles, video projects, audio recordings and drawings.

When we drink water we experience a somatic moment at the site where the external and internal meet - a primitive experience of a basic need being met. Plastic bottling has invaded this moment. We drink plastic water, part of a system that extends beyond the simple and immediate practice of drinking water. The residue of this process leaves internal traces in the body as it passes through our bodies – evidenced in the quenching of thirst, urinating and sweating.
 

http://hative.com/creative-installation-art-examples/

Nowinski interview on Shed.

Wish Tower is a project conceived by installation artist Maggie Nowinski produced in collaboration with sound and video artist Matt Waugh. Wish Tower includes large-scale sculptural video projections along with videos presented on analogue TV’s and HD monitors along with a 12ft tall scrap-wood tower sculpture reminiscent of a temple or shanty shelter. Meanwhile an audio component choreographed across over 8 channels includes vocalizations and sampled sounds relating to the visual content. In the room are also votive candles and texts.

The conceptual core of this the installation emerged from the artists’ vintage single match collection of matchbooks. Through Wish Tower this collection was replaced by wishes solicited mostly through craigslist (nationally and internationally), offered anonymously and gathered through an online form. Additional wishes include contributions from visitors who were encouraged to submit a wish, and select a single-match matchbook. While there are still matchbooks unaccounted for, there are still wishes to be collected and wished. During some open hours Nowinski incorporated a live performative element in the installation environment through live “wishing”. During these times, wishes were recorded and mixed live back through audio channels.

Wish Tower begins to address notions around wish granting, the meaning of wishes, singularity and collectivity and the personal value placed on objects collected. The installation environment creates a moody space and facilitates a process of letting go by way of appropriated and improvised ritual, contemplation, humor and the act of wishing. Videos incorporate rugged, imagined landscapes, and portraits of single matches are celebrated along with the quality of the individual wish, and the power of collectivity.

“Since 2000, I have been collecting matchbooks with only one match left. All of these matchbooks reached their state of singularity before I found them - almost daily between 2001-2003. Since 2007, my collecting has slowed significantly. It is time for the single matches to reach their potential. Each wish contribution allows the matches to express singularity while adding to a collection of wishes and assists me in a process of letting them go.”-  Maggie Nowinski

Swim Cargo (2014) Projection, reflective mylar, stacked 5 channel analogue monitores and audio in an 8’x8’x16’metal storage unit. “I am often most excited to create projects that relate to the architecture of a specific site. With this piece, the duration of the show - an accessible, festive three-hour community event along with the unflinching rigidity of the structure inspired an idea for video, light and sound to create an unexpected expansion or feeling of disorientation in the viewer upon entering. Recent flooding and loss in my studio after a fire resulted in an awareness of water as a transitional space and medium. This installation came out of a philosophy of experimentation and play, and the result is a collaborative effort in video and sound editing and of live performance for video documentation” - Maggie Nowinski

Claustros

2013, Holyoke Massachusetts
site-specific installation in abandoned jail cellblock
installation and video by Maggie Nowinski;
site specific audio performed and composed by Matt Weston

Installation components include objects found on-site; 19th century Massachusetts State Legislature leather bound texts, hand inked and typed police logs circa 1910’s-1970's, 1970’s Massachusetts Law Reviews, collected paint chip samples, reel to reel tape recorder with audio loop excerpt, King Dual-Purpose tissue paper, filing drawers with index cards, police receipts, expired cleaning supplies.

Architecture of Isolation: Every Day is the Exact Same Day

The ongoing practice of placing criminals in jail and calling them “correctional” facilities reveals a superficial, archaic and flawed understanding. Notions of enlightened democracy are called into question when faced with the reality of the primitive criminal system.  As participants in the overarching societal system, whether we actively choose it or not, we are implicated as co-architects in this system; perhaps on a larger scale that seems out of focus, our perceived lack of power acts as a kind of harness that binds us.

Notes from the site:

The jail site is so eerie it comes across as cinematic and staged, with its dust and discarded forgotten 19th century legal texts left to rot in the place intended to mete out the justice they enforced. The heavy-handed atmosphere calls out for a jungle of growth, song and light.

The reality and tangibility of these prison cells, with their metal, hieroglyphs and memories, began to dissolve the more time I spent in them cleaning, shedding light and listening.

I was reminded of the “Allegory of the Cave,” from Plato’s the Republic. Socrates describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato's Socrates, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality.

Fleeting flat shadows become reality to those chained. When light is shed and they are exposed to the actual form, an opportunity emerges, yet remains nearly impossible to seize and break out of ingrained thought patterns.

Bringing back the light has an empowering aspect to it as well. The mind becomes a place of solace. Alone with ghosts, this kind of monk-like existence offers a beautiful and pure isolation. Matt Weston’s responsive audio composition participates and suggests a metaphysical transformation. The power of the space of thoughts - hallucination, and consciousness evade the simplicity of the metal grid, escaping the blatant traps of the metal maze.

Video situated from within one cell and projected onto a far wall outside the cell, is meant to elicit the sensation for a viewer of being both inside and outside of the jail. The light is refracted through plastic to produce a blurry effect.

The reel-to-reel sample invites the possibility of lightness – a reminder of the exterior world. It highlights the era of the most recent time when these cells were in use while calling into question the narratives present in the space. The combination of audio sources plays with the psychology and mental states of the space and structure.

Recall, Recall (2007. 2011)
plaster objects, tree, audio projection

By Maggie Nowinski

Plaster cast mouths capture syllabic moments of the uttered sentence are you more afraid of being understood, or misunderstood? crawl up the side of an aging and dying white pine, like white fungus. An audio loop projects a soundtrack of whispered descriptions that have undergone a performative deterioration process. The artist's childhood memories of living with her single mother on Long Island many of which are memories that took place at Jones Beach were typed by the artist while blindfolded, allowing  spell check to make decisions of the correct spelling of misspelled words, resulting in a disjointed narrative. The artist read the text to blindfolded listeners who recounted the story, which the artist tried to re-commit to memory and type again in the same manner adding new spell-checked words. This final narrative was transcribed and read in a whisper for the recorded audio track. The initial narrative undergoes a process of translation, transformation, and deterioration, looking at the shifting relationships between memory, site, language, technology, and personal identity. On location for Art in the Orchard, this installation subjectively attempts to listen, inquire, and imagine the history of this tree within the context of this site.
Site-specific installation for Art in the Orchard, Easthampton, MA 2011.
 

Reflections was a video, sound, performative installation and collaborative project by Burns Maxey and Maggie Nowinski (2010).

“Reflections” is an exhibition that maps the city of Easthampton, MA. A primarily sound and video installation projects large-scale videos of constructed conversations between eight community members. The work also tracks the selected characters’ daily lives through photographs, and includes correspondence between the two artists via mailed postcards over a six month period. The installation includes the actual postcards along with video performance readings of the postcards received from each artist by the other. The opening evening will include a performance by the artists who will create a visual journey on a large-scale Sanborn map of the area, taking cues from audio dialogue projected in the space.

Both Maxey (Project Elements Easthampton) and Nowinski (Project Intersect) have previously created site-specific work about Easthampton. In their collaboration of Reflections the artists look at the city through exchanged observations and  the descriptions of the eight community members in a documentary style using larger-than-life portrait-style video projections. The audio and video in the installation are choreographed to express the self-described daily routes of the participants through the city and include observations about their environments.

Excerpt from "postcards".

http://reflectionseasthampton.tumblr.com/about

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF7d8Yu1al4

For Nature Nourishes, 2012 Hartford ArtSpace.

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All the photos in this template are taken by the talented photographer Akos Major.

Sampling of works created between 2003-2008.

http://maggienowinski.com/figurative-work/

www.maggienowinski.com