Scott Wolniak: You Can Lose Your Balance
@ 65GRAND
1378 W Grand Ave, 3, Chicago, IL 60622
Opening Friday, February 19th, from 7PM - 10PM
On view through Saturday, March 20th
A continuation of Scott Wolniak‘s work in video, as well as a marked return to painting.
In his single-channel video projection Flash Art (Circles and Rectangles), Wolniak presents the viewer with a close-up of a common studio clip-light being turned repeatedly on and off. Manipulating the composition by resizing and layering audio and video tracks, Wolniak constructs a flicker effect that progresses to disorienting limits. The clicking spiral of shapes traps light in various stages of haloed expansion and contraction. Like a trance-inducing metamorphosis, the firing light-bulb at times becomes a kind of eye, turning the gaze back on the viewer. Creating a deer-in-the-headlights experience that seduces with its hypnotic momentum and particle inertia, Wolniak’s optical crescendo leads one to an event horizon of the senses.
The paintings are a collection of cracked and battered canvases, where whiteness has been wrinkled into waterscape and emotion hammered into form. Visibly splintered stretcher bars remind one of a compound fracture or the collapsed remains of an overburdened tree. Sticks, bricks, and bottle caps are frozen projectiles, sent flying into a fight between composition and frustration, breaking the surface of our expectations. Tension in the contorted framework and buckled canvas registers as the embodiment of absurd action, compelling a contemplation of motive. One becomes witness to the crystallized wreckage of Wolniak’s gestural demolition. Like snapshots of dysfunction, his paintings capture moments of frustration and volatility—expressing a spirit that is humorous and jarring, and playfully destructive.
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