'Metamorphosis - Paramorphosis' in Slovakia

Exhibition Catalogue

Metamorphosis.

Paramorphosis.

• Gallery Caraffova vaznica (Caraffa Prison Gallery) in Presov 21st March - 15th April, 2019 ​ • Koniaren Gallery in Trebisov from 4th May - 25th May, 2019

Page 1 - Artdobro

Saggion-Paganello Page 2 - Tal RegevMila Raczkowska Page 3 - Fiona

Macphee Rosina Godwin

Page 4 - Patrick

Lears Rob Terrestrial

Page 5 - Nikki

Allford Clee Claire Lee

Page 6 - Emma

Dolphin Patricia Rain Gianneschi

Page 7 - Mima

Chovancova Ariel Lavian

Page 8 - Jana

Hatalova Petra Klepcova Page 9 - Karol Petres Vinay Sharma Page 10 - Rob Birch Kim Wan Page 11 - Ronald Gonzalez

Index

“Love is the sublime crucible wherein the fusion of the man and the woman takes place: the being one, the being triple, the being final, the human trinity proceeds from it”. - Victor Hugo The artwork “Unity” is inspired by artists’s true feelings and romantic emotions.

“Unity” illustrates the process of building strong, stable and healthy relationships where partners equally contribute to the spiritual growth of one another. A circular composition of the painting symbolises continuous movement of both partners towards a higher purpose whereas colour palette celebrates meaningful partnership in harmony.

Artdobro

E-mail: polina.dobrotina@gmail.com Website: https://artdobro.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ARTofDOBRO/ Instagram: http://instagram.com/artofdobro

Artists through the photographic medium have exposed the distorted and sick perception of those suffering from dysmorphism. Through the senses such as sight and hearing, those who suffer from this disease perceive their body, within the space, falsely; as a feedback that produces the displacement of the mass and that returning to the ear does not coincide with the idea put forward.

An obsession carried in a claustrophobic environment like in a shower room where every distorted sound appears muffled as it is impetuous in the mind of those who perceive it.

The means of reading the work with a final-beginning with eyes closed, symbolizes a non-return, a mental and physical occlusion.

www.saggion-paganello.com ig: saggionpaganello fb: Saggion-Paganello

Text by Valeria Saggion

Saggion-Paganello

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I work primarily with painting. My practice is concerned with the embodied experience of trauma.

Through the materiality of painting itself, I explore memory, loss, separation and the affect of pain. My works suggest a psychic map of what is “held” within the body.

Tal Regev

My email is: tal@talregev.co.uk Instagram: tal.regev Website: http://www.talregev.co.uk

My painting ,YOU ARE, is a celebration of change and an exploration of metamorphosis-para morphosis. As such it invites a consideration at a time, not its circular nature, or its attendant ritual, but in this case the relentless flight of time’s arrow, and an embrace of the elusive now.

Memory is fickle, and the future is uncertain.

None of us knows what he or she will become, but we can seek to understand where we are at this point in our transformative trajectory, this fleeting chord on the strings of existence.

Transformation happens whether we believe in it or not. While we may never know the ultimate outcome, there is a shared belief that our dreams matter and that together and as individuals, we have the power to shape our own stories and transform ourselves in positive ways.

Fb: Mila Raczkowska Art E-mail: m.raczkowska8069@gmail.com

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Mila Raczkowska

The Bacilli Landscapes project was borne out of a curiosity of the destructive processes that occur in our bodies that result in the need for medical intervention. Using the synergies of digital and analogue photographic mediums as an alternative process to definitive scientific tests, the images are the results of exploratory analysis of how the artists own micro-organisms evolve and consume. In capturing the process, the organic structures have created desolate and fragile landscapes, characterising life’s mutability.

Fiona Macphee

Email mactografee@gmail.com www.fionamacphee.photography Instagram & Facebook @mactografee

My work blurs gender boundaries, to examine the phallocentric construction of femininity, and the societal pressure to conform to both a standard role and beauty ideal.

The pieces play with the nurturing-destructive duplicity of the Mother archetype, as the homely associations of knitting become alien, when muted into taboo body parts. Mutter II, is a grotesque simplification of a woman with multiple breasts, parodying the perfect female bodies used to both sell products and reinforce patriarchal, capitalist ideals. Knitted Womb, deconstructs the oedipal complex to explore penis-envy, with an umbilical cord acting as a substitute phallus. Subverting the feminine quality of the colour pink, tactile softness is counteracted with coarse pubic-like fibres, to celebrate the natural female form.

Rosina Godwin Email - rosina.godwin1@btinternet.com Website - http://rosinagodwin1.wixsite.com/rosinagodwin Instagram – @rosina.godwin https://www.instagram.com/rosina.godwin/ Facebook – @RosinaGodwinArt https://www.facebook.com/RosinaGodwinArt/ Twitter - @RosinaGodwin(https://twitter.com/RosinaGodwin?lang=en-gb 3

Everything put together sooner or later falls apart. I start with the fallen apart and reconstruct when a cohesion or visual harmony presents itself…re-create.

I worked for a while as a photographer for an alternative newspaper and magazines. Some years into this I noticed how many black and white prints I was accumulating - especially prints that had been ‘improperly’ exposed or developed - yet I was reluctant to throw them out.

patrick-lears.squarespace.com https://www.instagram.com/patrick_lears/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/patricklears/ www.blurb.co.uk/user/plears

In time I started to cut them up - finding the essential in the sum of disparate parts by conjuring a new work. It’s a process that is a lot like throwing things into the air and seeing where everything lands. Chance plays a significant role.

Patrick Lears

Rob Terrestrial is an illustrator, animator and visual artist based in Norwich UK, studying a Masters degree in Moving Image and Sound.

Bold, straight line work and minimalistic, block colour structures are the basis of Robs practice, his abstract pen and ink drawings take influence from Constructivism, Street Art and Brutalist Architecture. Rob approaches his practice with a D.I.Y, punk ethos, organising exhibitions independently as part of the TBA artist collective.

This piece is a representation of the artist transitioning from a personal ‘black hole’, at a point where his artistic practice was a necessary outlet to regain and maintain mental stability, and the importance of acknowledging the presence of these ‘black holes’ that can appear from nowhere.

www.robterrestrial.com robburton1104@yahoo.co.uk instagram @robterrestrialart @tba_artist_collective 4

Rob Terrestrial

The Whiteness of You Paramorphosis- Dark, ethereal images capturing an extreme mental state, making the invisible, visible.

Nikki Allford is a Maker and Installation artist. Often incorporating the body in photography, within her work.

She is currently based in Bristol, Uk.

Nikki Allford nnikki.allford2@gmail.com

My work includes sculpture and installation, which I use to explore concepts of liminality and threshold, and to invite the audience into the uncanny space between certainties.

I weld or weave steel wire into routes and voids, connecting and disconnecting, intuitively composing large ethereal forms. I often suspend these and add light and sound to create immersive environments of barely visible transient beings.

clee@claireleeartist.com https://www.claireleeartist.com https://www.instagram.com/cleeclairelee https://www.curatorspace.com/artists/ fb10155378281495550 5

The engagement of my body, as medium and tool, is crucial as I draw out my ideas – both three-dimensionally with the wire, and in negotiating boundaries with other human bodies through collaborative voice and movement.

This way I contemplate how viewers connect with their own bodies when encountering my work.

Clee Claire Lee

emma.dolphin@network.rca.ac.uk

This work explores aspects of transition and metamorphosis, changes of state or status, which scrutinise the essence of being - of existing.

The use of the ice in this work and the metamorphic quality of the materiality of the frozen acids examine aspects of transition and is a metaphor for the impermanent and fragile nature of mortality. The work probes the illusory and the elusive moments which occur during and through the metamorphic transmutation.

The ice spheres change, over a period of time, from a frozen state and back to liquid, leaving only traces of their ever having been extant in the first place.

Emma Dolphin

The inspiration continues to come from the large painting “FALLEN�

Working with paint, paper, fibers, in a collage and painting mixed media approach I am inspired by the ancient theories concerning the origins of the human race and our relationship with Orion & the Cosmos

Patricia Rain Gianneschi www.praingianneschiart.com www.instagram.com/patti_rain www.facebook.com/patriciaraingianneschi

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Visual artist born in Bratislava, Slovakia in 1990. Living and practising in Brighton, UK since 2009. Obtained a Masters in Fine Art from University of Brighton in 2015.

Growing up in post-socialist Slovakia in the 1990s and being exposed to western toys and MTV has influenced my visual vocabulary and colour sensibility. I compose my pieces as visual colour-poems. Through engaging with lyrics and writing poetry myself as a part of my creative process, I use titles to link my visual language to the emotional world of pop songs. My research focuses on the history of Slovak culture, its mythology and collective identity in the context of artistic expression. Using auto-ethnography as my main methodology, I collect poetry, music and colour and use them as symbol and gesture in my work. Through practice I reflect on the elements that have shaped my identity and thus attempt to understand myself and others. I explore the relationship between nationality and identity and ask questions about cultural identity and ones place within society.

Mima Chovancova mima.chovancova@gmail.com http://mimachovancova.co.uk/ https://www.facebook.com/MimaChovancova/ https://www.instagram.com/mima_chovancova/

Full Hansen Disease - Deformation as an object Hansen’s disease, leprosy, is an infectious disease that leads to distortions in the body and on the skin.

The object is part of an ongoing experiment in which I ask questions about the deformation of the material, in this case, copper.

The deformation takes place, in the initial phase, in heat and melting, while in the second stage, with the help of various patinas on the metal surface.

Ariel Lavian Email: 34ariel@gmail.com web: www.ariellavian.com Instagram: www.instagram.com/ariellavian

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Jana Hatalová’s work is figurative, dealing with the themes of identity, flesh and sexuality. In her paintings she examines mainly the period of adolescence, the transformation of a girl into a woman, the emotional imbalance and the complexity of the transformation.

The works are narrative, bearing hints of dark and absurd stories with a disturbing atmosphere. Banal scenes from the Internet as well as photographs from the author’s archive are processed through the subconscious optics with the inclusion of archetypal characters and symbols.

Jana Hatalova janka.hatalovaa@gmail.com

Petra Klepcová (1990) graduated from the Studio of Free Creativity 3D at the Faculty of Art in Košice. In her work, she devotes herself to painting, sculpture, object and artistic activism in public space and design.

Her work is characterized by a variety of approaches and a wide range of topics. For a long time, she deals with the theme of architecture and urban periphery. Currently she is exploring the dreamy forms of images between pop art and expression.

Petra Klepcova petraklepcova@gmail.com petraklepcova.com

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Karol Petres paints people on the fringes and scums, whose fate engraved sharp lines into the body and into the soul.

The black manuscript on both the visual and the physically heavy, color-saturated surfaces follows the tangle of these lines, ripples and ties to the muscle yarn, but refers to psychological connotations.

Petre’s figures and portraits are mostly centrally located in the canvas, as solitaires of the periphery of civilization. The portrait almost loses facial features, becomes a spot, a head explosion in which unstoppable, sickly swirling anxiety can be read. Lines and surfaces are intersecting, the mass of color is superimposed on the resulting black, as if to capture all the hidden planes of our existentiality.

Karol Petres kpetres@zoznam.sk

I find myself exhausting the limits when it comes to my passion for the things of the past. I have always felt that the memories of the past inspire me to create something new in the field of art. You can’t help feel a profound connection with the times bygone when you peep into the ancient scripts and artefacts in my art. The old handwritten manuscripts and other artefacts associated with the bygone times became the very source of inspiration for me. The past, I feel, deserves gratitude and respect. I knit this past into my very art.

My constant endeavour is to motivate the future generation through my art that is so intricately woven with Indian culture.

Vinay Sharma

9

Rob Birch robbirch68@googlemail.com

Kim Wan (b.1970) is a British artist of East Asian Polynesian and Western European heritage. Kim Wan’s artworks are all painterly – whether it’s the obsessive exploration in his series of self-portraits, or the ‘decorated’ dollar bills contributing to largescale major installations. Surprisingly graffiti has been a strong thread throughout his art career.

Kim Wan

www.kimwanart.com info@kimwanart.com

10

Ronald Gonzalez is a contemporary figurative artist based in upstate New York.

Since the mid seventies the artist has worked from his garage studio creating elegiac sculptures and installations that are embodiments of death and loss infused with grotesque narrative, and pathos. Gonzalez works primarily in a series with steel armatures and macabre collections of time worn objects, and detritus from his surroundings.

Ronald Gonzalez www.ronaldgonzalezstudio.com Gonzalez@binghamton.edu

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Exhibition Catalogue

Metamorphosis.

Paramorphosis.

www.artnumber23.uk @artnumber23