Kasia Turajczyk » Abstract Art

Contemporary Art in the Community #3/n

Kasia — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 22:19:44 +0000

On October 1st, 2011 two friends came to dinner. Ami is a musician and Didge is a studying at Plymouth College of Art.

We asked them to take part in our art-video project Contemporary Art in the Community. Both of them agreed and were happy to do so. It seems both of them are into art in a big way!

Here is our 3rd video in the series:

Contemporary Art in the Community #3/n

Kasia's Studio; The Haldon Hills, Devon, South West England

In which Ami realises that art shouldn't be about "cutting us off from the fabric of our life experience. Art is about coming up underneath our life experience, and lifting us up".

More on Contemporary Art in the Community #3/n

Contemporary Art in the Community #2/n

Kasia — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 12:37:40 +0000

Here is the second video of the project Contemporary Art in the Community. We had an unexpected visit from Doreen on October 1st 2011. She is very much into art and she liked our idea. The video has been taken outside my studio on the Haldon Hills in Devon. In this video Doreen recognises Hell when she sees it, and feels herself drowning in a really stormy, turbulent sea in one of my paintings.

More on Contemporary Art in the Community #2/n

Contemporary Art in the Community #1/n

Kasia — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 22:33:09 +0000

“Contemporary Art in the Community” is a joint project between me Kasia Turajczyk and econnexus.org.

The idea of taking art to the community came from Jim (my partner). I think he was just bored with my constant monologue about contemporary art, or to be more accurate perhaps I should say modern contemporary art.

My monologue was about these issues:

How alienated modern contemporary art is from the image about art of the average man and woman in the street. The average person visiting a very contemporary art gallery or modern art centre at the present time doesn’t understand most of the presenting art works. She or he wants to understand the “art works”. Because they can’t understand it, explain it, find any sense in it, they think they don’t possess the academic knowledge about modern art, and they just don’t like it.
How alienated, exhausted and recessive art that is currently presented in contemporary art galleries, art shows and modern art museums. Actually, nobody understands contemporary art these days: not the art historicists, not the art curator, not even the people who are writing the articles in the art magazines or introductions in the books. Very often even the makers/the artists don’t understand them either. They just like it and make it up, because that is what others expect of them.
Art doesn’t exist anymore. Most of the 'Art' isn't art any more. Nothing is art and everything is art. Art is about personal and emotional engagement. You like it or you do not, you feel it or you do not feel it; it makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it makes you angry, it makes you disgusted. It is OK! How few techniques and skills are possessed by the new generation of students graduating from the Art Colleges these days.
Most of the artists presented in museums are talking to themselves, and have an inner dialogue with their empty mind.
However Pablo Picasso said: “Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? .. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.” Art is about feeling….or should I say NON-ART is about sensation. Maybe we never should think about what an artist is trying to convey, just concentrate on what the piece means to you, how it makes you feel. After all it is your personal experience!

And so forth and so forth…..

One day, just a few hours before our trip to the ocean (body boarding) Jim came out with a idea about taking ART to ordinary people and discussing contemporary art and art in general. “And the word became flesh and dwelt among us” since September 29, 2011.

The primary aim of the project is to take contemporary art out of galleries and museums, to take it out of artist's studios, and to show it to all sorts of different people in a variety of environments and locations around South West England.

We would like to discover from the ordinary people of Devon and Cornwall, what kind of art they like and what they don’t like. What contemporary art means to them? Are they interested in art at all? Is there a place for art in their life, living room, kitchen, mind? Or maybe they are not interested in art at all? These are the sort of questions we are going to be asking people on our travels. Maybe we will ask you too!

The preview of Contemporary Art in the Community

Widemouth Bay, North Cornwall, South West England
Thursday 29th September 2011

In which Graham meets a being born in the nebula of the constellation of Orion for the very first time, and is moved by Mintaka's message for mankind.

Metropolis Series – Resistance 99% – Work in Progress

Kasia — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:30:41 +0000

I am working on my new abstract painting from the Metropolis Series. This time this abstract work will be dedicated to the people of Occupy Wall Street Movement. My painting is entitled "Metropolis – Resistance 99%. The title as well as the painting is inspired by the uprisings across the Arab world, and fueled by the feelings of anger and helplessness of everyday Americans, in the past month as well all people around the world belonging to the 99%.

Occupy Wall Street is a people powered movement that began on September 17, 2011 in Liberty Square in Manhattan’s Financial District, and has spread to over 100 cities in the United States and actions in over 1,500 cities globally.#OWS is fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations.The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, Italy and the UK, and aims to expose how the richest 1% of people who are writing the rules of the global economy are imposing an agenda of neoliberalism and economic inequality that is foreclosing our future.

Metropolis-The resistance continues ; acrylics on canvas

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Garden Art Wall Installation – CD's – Part II

Kasia — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 15:12:23 +0000

The "Beautiful and Ugly" project has now been officially closed. The deadline has been slightly shifted in time. A few people could not visit me during the Devon Open Studios event itself, and asked me not to dismantle the installation but instead to wait until they had a chance to see it.

Here are the images of the final result:

The end result 2 October 2010

Ugly - final reslut

Beautiful final October 2010

The installation in the Garden of Lyalls Cottage

Unused CD

My conclusions:

Brown, yellow-brown and red colours predominate on the "ugly" side.

Emphatic resistance to the colour red. The CD's in red on the side of "Beautiful" are only in combination with other colours.
They are lots of CDs on the Ugly side that I personally like a lot.

And last, but perhaps the most important conclusion:

De gustibus non est disputandum.

"In matters of taste there is no dispute" said the Romans a long time ago and they were right. Any opinion on the topics of taste is futile. Objectively and logically it can be concluded that there is no good or bad taste. You cannot say that someone is wrong or that someone is right only because he or she likes something different than you. What I like you don’t have to. One should not judge others just because they feel differently and/or think differently.
To recapitulate, in general humans are stupid if they surrender themselves to the pressure of public opinion, newspapers, magazines, fashion designers, critics, art critics and so on. The implication is that the media prey on our stupidity. But this is a different discussion and a subject for another long debate!

Thank you very much to all of you who took part in making this installation.

It will now be dismantled and moved to Poland where I will have a solo exhibition later this year. I will post about the Polish results after the close of the exhibition in Poland in December.

From the Series My Brain – when the demons are awakened (new version)

Kasia — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:42:35 +0000

Sometimes it happens that I resume a painting that was supposed to be finished. I try to improve it, change it, overpaint it or add new things to it. After a few sessions the painting changes and sometimes something totally new arises. Most of the time it is a positive change, but it has happened before that I totally ruin my painting. Fortunately it doesn’t happen often!

The painting “when the demons are awakened” from the series My Brain tortured me so intensively that I had to change it. For comparison purposes I am publishing both the old and the new versions. In the new version I worked with more tricky colours and I added more crazy materials. It is more frantic and wilder. I think that the words “frantic” and maybe even "furious” could describe this new painting. What else should you expect when the demons are awakened?

My Brain when the demons are awakened - new

My brain when the demons are awakened - old

The Boltzmann Brain

Kasia — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 11:50:43 +0000

I really believe that the theory of the Boltzmann Brain Paradox is very probably correct. I truly believe in it. It is my own paranoiac delirium.

This new painting is inspired by the latest ideas about Boltzmann Brains from Don Page, a physicist – “Unless our universe is decaying at an astronomical rate (i.e., on the present cosmological timescale of Giga years, rather than on the quantum recurrence timescale of googolplexes), it would apparently produce an infinite number of observers per commoving volume by thermal or vacuum fluctuations (Boltzmann brains). If the number of ordinary observers per commoving volume is finite, this scenario seems to imply zero likelihood for us to be ordinary observers and minuscule likelihoods for our actual observations.”

If that is true, it would mean that you and me, you reading this and I writing this, are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than persons with a real past and possible future (if we are lucky or unlucky enough). My and your memories and the world we think we see around us are illusions.
“Hence, our observations suggest that this scenario is incorrect and that perhaps our universe is decaying at an astronomical rate.” In other words it means our universe will die one day.

This is my paranoia – my hallucination. Millions of Boltzmann Brains are floating in my brain.