Employing a title that conjures up connotations related to the multiple and at times convoluted interrelationships found and created between the millions of social media users in the world, Margo Wolowiec’s solo exhibition, “Following” at Johansson Projects transform inherently intangible internet and social media imagery like digital photographs into richly textural and colorful hand-woven textile artworks. In this show, Wolowiec herself is following; following societal nuances in a physically-absent digital age, and records it in a palpable, traditional medium using a dye and sublimation ink process with a deeply meditative, repetitive practice, directly contrasting to the ephemeral and at times haphazard speed of the “cyber-centric” subject matter.
Her work often resides between mediums and is achieved through several approaches, using various processes to activate archives of history, memory, and nostalgia. Syphoning motifs and imagery from digital cultural channels and filtering cultural relevance and reflection using performance, visual arts, and craft, Wolowiec reacts to the contemporary world’s growing immateriality while it is concurrently highly reliant on the immediately visual, visceral culture. Through these textiles the internet’s at times incessant barrage of imagery is softened and becomes an almost alluring, dreamlike sphere both known and yet unknown to its viewers.
Seeming to result from a thorough and thoughtful investigation of her foundational materials in a variety of forms and manifestations, Wolowiec implements unwoven textile strands unbound from their re-presentations in an unique installation, relinquishing in part the artist’s composer role. Strands upon which are printed photographs of anonymous, fractured faces returning the gaze and smile into a space and time in which it no longer inhabits are gently hurled over a dome display, fall with solemn eloquence, never reaching its end. Precariously suspended in a moment before its final descent to the floor, the threads are subject to movement from even a light breeze of a passerby, a pertinent analogy to the fading and fickle nature of the images themselves.
Margo Wolowiec, “Following” will be at Johansson Projects 2300 Telegraph Ave. through March 15
