Janusz Wrobel
In an act of seeing
Projects.
Identifying all needs in my life, and ways of making sense, is a matter of my choice. The essential are in my every breath, water and food I need. An adult choice is to know the content of them, and how secure is their supply.
All supplies rely on the interactions between the two worlds.
The first is the one we all came from. The second is our collective interpretations of the first one, and sense making. Can we ever buy or win the means of the first world?
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Projects Overview
If reality is a persistent illusion, I choose it at any time over fictions or fantasies. Peeling one like an onion, getting rewarded by my discoveries of hidden structures, draws me in. It is more practical, never boring. A chance to gauge of what might be our common grounds.
It's my way of navigating the world of mounting, mutually excluding, contradictions. A world of growing consequences from what were supposed to be improvements in our lives. And the polarities of our views making conciliatory approach to problem solving less effective.
Encounters summarize five projects with one underlying goal.
With mounting challenges to our relationships and social structures,
cross-referencing can help efforts to optimize while addressing them.
Project Introductions
The water's edge was where people liked to meditate. Our weakness or transcendence, our drives to explore, exploit, conquer what lies ahead and beyond, seeking a better place. Now, it has been all
about "here and now", how to fit into realms of human coexistence.
How we progress forward, at what costs of consequences?
I like to reflect there on living cells within my body, functionally aware of all others. Each self-contained unit of Life suspended in calm water, in harmony of unifying coexistence, purpose and connection.
To progress anywhere, sometimes we need to view things around
us as the web of natural processes we must accept and adapt to.
Expecting otherwise might be futile or outright dangerous.
Is the self elevated focus and escape from reality good enough then?
All around me is the world of relationships trying to influence me and to shape my life. Identifying them, though, is difficult. As an example, a workplace is where employees are expected to subordinate to employers' goals and their metrics, often at the expense of accepted ethical norm, or standards. It might affect my personal life, where the web of relationships sprouts from different grounds and principles. Keeping them separate might be impossible, or a lifetime challenge.
I lived within many social structures, ideologies, their outcomes, and consequences. Each time, the reference to core values helped with adaptations. I relayed on intuitive references, like primordial archetypes of relationships formed along the path of human cognitive evolution. Woodland’s walk always helped me to restore balance in my relationships. Abounds of references there, and time.
I often felt like living misplaced between two worlds. The urban world offered all around escapes the mundane into fantasy grounds. Theatres, books, galleries, shopping, exotic trips, news, all highly rewarding. The second world, that I was often passing by on my white-water canoe adventures, appeared tediously unattractive. The endless stretches of scruffy, impenetrable vegetation. Both worlds appeared to be oblivious to another, indulging in separation.
Once stranded by high water, I started paying attention to the web of relationships on the grounds. And I discover my Petri dish of giant scale, assembling the essential founding blocks of both worlds. Worlds once to be as one. I saw in it a new garden of Eden, where science laws, once learned but forgotten, were visibly practiced.
Landscape, as an art genre, was characterized as an objective image of a land, inviting viewers to populate it with their own stories. For many decades now, it is a broad range of their authors' visions focused on forms and styles more than land itself. The historical works, therefore, have still the receptive audience. In photography,
it is a free-for-all web marketplace of "landscaped" images to like.
Year after year, I go out to embrace the spaces of history, meaning, and Life's tiresome work. Often just to contemplate echoes of friendships once forged there, swarms of insects and birds that vanished with many old story lines. Along my hopes of taking there my grandchildren to forge our own stories to endure.
All quiet on the nature's front, and the silence is deafening.
I use photography for its innate fusion of credible documentary and interpretative qualities. It imposes on me the cognitive discipline advancing each project. They linked by the apparent inabilities of most societies to find mechanisms of resolution for the growing conflicts within. My starting point was an observation about the evident departure from the principles of conflict resolution.
I investigated the state of these principles’ comprehension among
a little section of urban population in the industrial city of Hamilton, Ontario. I documented changes in the urban setting of the past century, and the city transitioning to post-industrial age difficulties.
I used framed images to challenge the audience to interact with them by writing comments on their surface in a public setting.
The outcome documents the state of social consciousness about it.
I stopped submission to exhibit my work for valid reasons.
I am ready, though, to cooperate with artists or curators about exhibition projects with coherent vision, adequate visual material and space, and well-defined ideas about means of promoting it. I have many artworks exhibitions ready, and ideas about supporting them with parallel multi-screen presentations.