Please join the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Art (DoVA) virtually for a conversation between Scott Wolniak and Jennifer Samet on Monday, March 8 at 6PM CST for a special DoVA Faculty Lecture and Open Practice Committee edition of Beer with a Painter.

Multidisciplinary artist and DoVA Instructional Professor Scott Wolniak will talk about his past work and recent paintings with New York-based writer and curator, Jennifer Samet. Topics of discussion will include studio process, material exploration, physical painting, humor, the z axis, and slow art, among others.

Please register in advance for this event. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email from DoVA containing the Zoom details on how to join.

Scott Wolniak’s solo exhibition “Alight” is currently on view at Goldfinch through April 10th, 2021.

REGISTER HERE

About the show

Scott Wolniak’s multi-disciplinary practice encompasses painting, drawing, video, and sculpture; in all media, the Chicago-based artist is concerned with building relationships and spaces that he has described as “contemplative and funny.” Wolniak strives to create pictorial spaces that ask for and reward “slow” ways of looking.

“The accumulation of small marks, chance operations and textural fragments creates optical energy, and embodies an off-kilter sort of life-force that I think of as my style,” Wolniak recently noted. “Disparate sources such as natural phenomena, urban decay, new-age symbolism and studio-craft merge to illuminate everyday life within a cosmic context.”

In the new series of paintings and cut paper works included in Alight, invented botanical forms are the starting point for artistic improvisation. Plants and grass imagery provide Wolniak with “a flexible structural motif” that function both as symbols of the natural world as well as allegories for human behavior.

Artist’s Bio:
Scott Wolniak is a multidisciplinary artist, teacher and occasional curator based in Chicago. His work in drawing, painting, sculpture and video utilizes labor-intensive techniques and humble materials, along with humor and optical effects, to explore the ever-evolving relationship between landscape and abstraction, outer space and inner space. Wolniak has exhibited extensively throughout the US. His work has been written about in publications including ArtForum, Art in America and the Chicago Tribune, and is part of numerous permanent collections, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee. Wolniak received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995 and MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2002. He is an Instructional Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.

Official Website

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Tags: Alight, Chicago, East Garfield Park, Goldfinch, Jennifer Samet, Scott Wolniak