Kasia Turajczyk » installation

Kasia Turajczyk at Red Dot Miami – December,1-5 2011

Kasia — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 13:34:06 +0000

The Red Dot Art Fair once again takes place at the Wynwood Art District in Miami, from December 1 to 5. Red Dot Miami is conveniently located in a prime spot for art fairs, while taking place during Miami’s art fair season. Some neighbors would include Art Miami, Scope Miami, and Art Asia. Red Dot Miami also runs concurrently with Art Basel Miami Beach.

And I will be there represented by Artisan Direct Ltd. 6 of my paintings from the Return of Peter Pan Series will be to admire. I am not humble, but I am really love this series. The paintings are cheerful, mysterious, some of them surreal, some of them funny all of them really beautiful. I hope if you are living in Florida or close to Miami you will go and see my paintings. I would love it.

A selection of paintings from Return of Peter Pan Series

Red Dot Miami covers the entire spectrum of artists, including emerging, mid-career, and established artists. This year’s show involves nearly 45 galleries from all across the globe, specializing in both modern and contemporary art. Works include just about every medium in contemporary practice: painting photography, sculpture, and works on paper. There is also a special section devoted to the debut of specific film and photography projects. Additionally another newly developed section is reserved for books. This area is for publishing houses showing editioned publications and book arts. Red Dot Miami aims to promote this medium and bring recognition to independent publishers.

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.

The Devon Open Studios 2011 – second day

Kasia — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 18:54:21 +0000

Today is the second day of Devon Open Studios 2011. No visitors today. Yesterday a couple with a child visited me. They just saw a sign on the wall and because the child needed to take a leak they stopped and visited me. They were nice people but not really interested in my paintings or in what I am doing or why I am doing it.

I have created a new installation in the garden. It is about my insomnia. I got the inspiration from my own problems with sleeping and from a book I received from my 'art fan' in Brussels. If he is reading this post, he will be happy to know that I found the publication about Narcolepsy very educational and interesting.

Here is a photo of the installation:

Insomnia - Narcolepsy - Installation 2011 by Kasia B.T.

I am starting to think about my dream to make it as an artist as something very irrational, utopian and pathetic. Who needs art, who needs my art? If you have finished an art academy and if you don't "make it" within the next three years then you will never make it. The talent, ideas, originality, whatever it is of no importance after that. It is just the significance to being discovered by a very important art dealer and some luck. Then the marketing machine will start to work for you. Otherwise it will not.

Here are a few images of my work in progress:

Landscape in gold and blue

A bird in colours of Devon

The Gravitation of the Clown - painting in progress

We are born alone, we die alone together

Science, video and the Boltzmann Paradox

Kasia — Wed, 25 May 2011 11:20:17 +0000

On May, 11th 2011 I was invited by Tiverton Art Society to give a talk about art, video and the Boltzmann Paradox. The society has more than 200 members and is a very active one. Tiverton is an ancient borough and market town in the county of Devon, and the major town in the Mid Devon. It was a real pleasure to be there and to talk to the audience about quantum physics, my own art and art in general, and to present some of my videos. I even read one of my poems, the one about a physicist of course, the Nobel prize winner Niels Bohr.

I had some concerns before the talk, associated with my accent and random blockages of my memory; especially as I am tired (actually I am in a state of chronic fatigue related to my ME condition). I also wanted to talk about quantum physics, thermodynamics and the Boltzmann Paradox in a language in which I still struggle to express myself in the way I want to. When I talk in English I switch my brain into think-in-English mode, which is the way to master a foreign language. But still too often I am sucked in by antimatter, which tries to destroy my brain, confuse my memory and makes it impossible to have an intellectual, sophisticated chat. I find myself missing words, idioms, sayings, humorous expressions, knowledge of complicated grammatical structures. It is a matter of exercises, persistency and strong will, I know that. I am too old and I am lazy, I guess. J) However, I think everything came out successfully. The audience reaction was lively, and I thought they showed a real enthusiasm. I was talking about myself, my art, my videos, and physics and Boltzmann Creatures of course. I brought two big abstract paintings and a few new ones from the “Peter Pan” series. I was myself, spontaneous and a ‘little crazy’ as usual.

The Brits in general are very nice and polite people. Think about it for a moment; all the foreigners using and murdering their beautiful language and then the Brits listening and smiling and trying to understand the others. It is quite an achievement. They have my full admiration for their patience and calm. Definitely the majority of the audience preferred watching art videos and videos about my art than listening to my talk about quantum physics. (Maybe they were bored with my accent and my English!?) I wanted to talk more about thermodynamics and entropy but it was unanimously decided to watch all three videos about the Boltzmann Creatures, Betelgeuse and Mintaka instead of being educated about the laws of physics. Well, the perception of art proceeds in a completely different way than the understanding of the laws of physics. You have to force and to strain your grey cells to understand what quantum physics is all about. On the other hand it is surprising, to me at least, that we don’t try to understand the laws of physics more. As if the world we live in wasn’t extremely complicated. Just think about it for a second. Everything that surrounds us is related to one or another law of physics.

My talk was recorded. From the long video I chose the most interesting and amusing parts, from my point of view of course. Here is a short video part 1:

More on Science, video and the Boltzmann Paradox

Kasia in the Countryside

Kasia — Tue, 24 May 2011 11:12:13 +0000

I created a video/slideshow to present my art from the last two years. Paintings, collages, installations, small sculptures all created in Devon, in Dunchideock. And of course lots of nature, black swans, trees, a cat and nice music.

Kasia in the Countryside

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.

Inspired by the colours of Devon

Kasia — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 19:15:51 +0000

My first 17 months of living in the country, in a real village have been a wonderful experience and bore lots of wonderful paintings, collages, installation and even small sculptures. The nature of Devon inspired me to be very creative with materials and to experiment with unusual topics for me. I hope it will move me forward to discover new possibilities for the surface, texture, patterns of my paintings and to invent new original genres.

What are the inspirations for my new work?. Definitely the colours and the sounds of the garden of Lyalls Cottage and the fields and meadows around Dunchideock, of Devon; the animals in and around the garden; the hills behind the river Exe in the East and de shapes of Exmoor in the North, the shooting stars at the cloudless sky in the night and all the others inexpressible sensational impulses and invisible mystical creatures.

I am so happy to be here, Devon is a wonderful spot to live!

Here are the images of my new collages and installations. I will make a separate post about the sculptures.

collage canvas prints

Garden Art Wall Installation – CD's

Kasia — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 23:00:50 +0000

During the Devon Open Studios I am inviting my visitors to take part in the process of producing an installation. It is an Art Wall Installation in my opinion. It is a large wall board, painted in different colours from black to white and all the nuances of white-grey, grey-grey and black grey. I prepared lots of mini-art works- painted old CD's. They are painted in different colours and they have different surfaces. Some of them smooth, some of them rough. All of them unique. Some of them ugly and some of them very nice. I divided the Art Wall Installation – the board in two parts: the Beautiful one and the Ugly one. We all love judging. We don't like to be judged but we do love to judge other people and other things. We should not do it. It is very bad actually, but we just do it. In the case of my installation I am asking people to make a judgement about a small piece of art work I made. I ask them to make a choice between what they think is beautiful and what they think is ugly, between nice and not nice, between what they like and what they don't like. The reactions are very interesting, some of the visitors don't want to choose an ugly CD. They just refuse to do so. Some of them are saying that such a concept as ugly don't not exist in art. Others I guess don't want to be unpleasant to me, the artist. And me, I am just curious about the taste of people, what they do like and what they do not. What is ugly for them and what is beautiful. I don't know if I will be able to come to an eventual intelligent conclusion at the end of this experiment. But I do know that I am very curious about the final result.

Here are some photos after a couple of days.

Press Release – Devon Open Studios 2010

Kasia — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 09:15:02 +0000

Artist in Exeter/Dunchideock to take part in Devon Open Studios

Kasia Turajczyk
Lyalls Cottage, Dunchideock, Exeter, EX6 7YD

http://gallery.kasiaturajczyk.com

Phone: 01392 833904

Established Dunchideock artist, Kasia Turajczyk will be inviting guests into her studio/local gallery to view her new work this year in the forthcoming county-wide arts event, Devon Open Studios.

It is the largest showcase for artists in the county and Kasia Turajczyk will be joining over 260 artists opening their doors for 16 days from 4th –19th of September. Kasia will be taking part for the first time and is looking forward to her contribution to the event held at her studio in the garden of Lyalls Cottage and her gallery within the cottage.

Kasia began painting as a child, and for her becoming a successful artist is the realization of a life-long passion. She has lived in several countries with different political systems; diverse cultures, different languages, peoples, and landscapes and that fact has had a big influence on her development and growth as an artist and as a person.

Kasia works in diverse fields of art: paintings, installations, collages, fantasy art and new media. When you visit her studio you will be able to see examples of such work, together with recent abstract and modern figurative collages with a hint of surrealism, inspired by the nature of Devon. Nature is also a source of raw materials for Kasia's art, which enables her to achieve some very interesting structural effects.

She will also be showing some new installations entitled Personalities, created from old CD’s, acrylics and recycled materials (weather permitting in the open air of the garden). Kasia will also be inviting her visitors to take part in the process of producing an installation. She will be providing such an environment during the Open Studio weeks to make it possible for visitors to work together with her, and to have the opportunity to talk to her directly about the creative process.

Kasia Turajczyk is looking forward to the show and hopes that Devon Open Studios will help raise her profile. In 2009 over 30,000 visits were recorded, an almost two fold increase from the year before. Free to the public, the event provides a unique chance to see a wide variety of new work.

Devon Open Studios produces a comprehensive guide to help visitors plan their own art trail and combine browsing art with enjoyment of the county’s fantastic scenery. Free copies of the guide are now available at tourist information centres, libraries, galleries, and hotels. The most prominent place in Dunchideock where the guide will be available is the well known Lord Haldon Hotel (10 minutes walk from Kasia Turajczyk’s studio -http://www.lordhaldonhotel.co.uk).

The Blueberrry Fantasy - acrylics on canvas

Heaven is in my mind!

Kasia — Fri, 14 May 2010 22:49:39 +0000

Heaven and hell have first of all a symbolic meaning for me. I was born into a family with Catholic traditions (with the exception of a few atheists and one Buddhist). I was born in a country where for many being Catholic is the status quo. For various individuals in Poland being a part of the Roman Catholic family is a criterion of being Polish too. If I was born in India in a Buddhist family hell and heaven would be for me just abstract, meaningless words.

I remember as a child, I had to attend Sunday masses. I didn’t like them; it was for me a kind of torment, literally and metaphorically. Probably I was very afraid to be confronted again and again, by the fearful personifications of God presented by the clerics. I was terrified to be punished for all the sins that I hadn’t committed yet, but would in the future. There was no escape from that. Even the angels had a kind of apocalyptic dimension. When lying in bed, I often thought about my “personal” Angel. I had no doubt about the fact that somewhere an Angel was watching me. I had one big problem. I wasn’t sure if it was a good Angel or a bad one. Maybe it was a hellish one and not a holy one. I had a picture of an angel hanging above my bed. He was beautiful, with blue eyes and white hair and a very, very distressing smile. And so it was that my Angel was gazing at me, as if he knew that one day I would betray him and leave him. When at the age of 12 I had rebelled and had declared that “I don’t want to believe and I categorically deny any belief in such a cruel, evil, bad god and I do not want to be frightened any more of hell, devils and original sin” I had terrible dreams for the first months afterwards. In my dreams I was somewhere close to the church. It was a big Gothic church, and it was always night. I was attacked by devils, they tore me, hurt me; wild winds had jerked me into the square in front of the church, darkness and a terrible fear occupied my dreams. That was a horrible experience, a nightmare, but even more it cemented my decision that God, who is haunting me, punishing me, and scaring me, will not be my god.
And so it happened, that I became somehow atheist, somewhat Buddhist, a follower of my personal faith; all together my religion is a kind of eclecticism.

Since that time I have been trying to avoid that hell on earth, in my daily life, in my relationships with others, but also in my thoughts and feelings. Hell and Heaven, we create them for ourselves, here on this planet, in our lives, our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, hatreds, and in relationships.
Hell and Heaven are also created for us by nature, life, and the condition of being homo sapiens, something that is unavoidable; we can only accept it.

After this very long introduction it is time for introducing my new painting.

This is an installation composed of four panels, titled “Heaven Is In My Mind”. It belongs to the “My Brain” series.
There is a lot of blue, gold, purple, dark plum, grains of all sorts, and recycled stuff.
It is large: 80 cm x 80 cm.