Janusz Wrobel
In an act of seeing
Is there a value in refining something over billions of years, and a risk ignoring it?
Identifying my needs and making sense of them is my responsibility. Essentials like air, water, and food require me to understand their supply sources and security.
Supply depends both on the natural world to deliver, and on our collective ways of interpreting it. How can I ensure sustained means to my well-being then?
The overview of all projects. Formatted for desktop viewing as a PDFs. Best option; browser set in presentation mode.
Even if "reality is a persistent illusion," I choose it at any time over fictions or fantasies. Peeling one like an onion, getting rewarded by discoveries of hidden structures underneath, draws me in. It is more practical, and never boring. And a chance to gauge what might be our common ground.
It's my way of navigating the world of growing, mutually excluding, contradictions. A world of growing consequences from what were supposed to be improvements in our lives. And from the polarity of our views making the conciliatory problem solving less effective.
I encapsulated my projects with an underlying goal. As our social structures and relationships are being challenged on many fronts, a constructive contribution to our culture appears to be the urgent call. And to abandon the passive expectations that dominate the Western World.
Project's Introductions
Formatted for Natural Disclosures, my past website project. Intended for desktop viewing as PDFs. Best option: browser set in presentation mode.
If life is an opportunity of choice, its cornerstone was the one that mattered most. The unique properties of water molecules. They assisted in the bonding of all subsequent molecules, their selection, protection, outcome, and gradual refinement. They also allow my brain to work, and my ability to understand, if I elect to do so. The state of the collective consciousness today, and our cool heads, matters the most.
On the water's edge, I'm wondering what drives me and why. Or about the living cells within my body, functionally aware of all others, each being a self-contained unit of Life suspended in calm water, in harmony of unifying coexistence, purpose and connections. I am asking myself. Why rock the boat on rough waters, being blind to the depth of the water's anger, and to the penalties for my reasoning?
My daily walks in the woods brush me with a host of intuitive references, the archetypes and incarnations of unconditional relationships. Nature's way of distributing and storing our sun's energy by facilitating water and carbon flows. Controlling air content, its behaviour by the water vapour transfer and phase change. Daily marvel of ultimate connections. Everything above by the underground network of ultimate sharing, communicating and coexistence.
I live in an urban environment within a network of relationships oriented to define my identity, thoughts, behaviour and lifestyle. To fit the norm of our coexistence. Workplaces have associated social structures, subordinating us to their procedures, goals and metrics. My civil life relay on social structures governed by democratic principles. My private life relay on relationships with my life partner and my friendships with peers. Navigating, separating, and prioritizing all of them is a lifelong challenge for anyone living in the urban population. With the impossibility of all tasks or the urge to ignore all, the working set of references is an eye-opener.
Sometimes, I felt lost, or like living between two split realms. The urban world offered all-around escapes from the mundane into fantasy grounds. Shopping, theatres, books, exotic trips, news, and much more. Alluring and emotionally stimulating, full of rewards promises. The northern environment I was passing by on white-water canoe adventures appeared unpleasant. Stretches of impenetrable plant life and annoying insects. Both worlds that appeared to be oblivious to each other, indulged in unintended separation..
Once stranded for days by high water, I started paying attention to the web of transparent relationships on rocky ground. And I discovered a petri dish on a giant scale, assembling the essential building blocks of both worlds. Worlds that used to be one. I saw the new Garden of Eden, where science laws, once learned but forgotten, were evidently practiced.
As an art genre, the landscape was characterized as an objective image of a land, inviting viewers to populate it with their own stories. For decades now, it appears to be the range of their authors' visions, focused more on forms, colours and styles than land itself. The historical works might still have a receptive audience. In photography, it is a free-for-all web marketplace of detached "landscaped" images of everywhere.
I travel my country to embrace the spaces of our history, and the meaning of Life's tedious processes. The frame I apply to portrait them is of my growing understandings explored in prior projects. Often, just to contemplate friendships once forged there, swarms of insects and birds that vanished along old story lines. With hopes that my grandchildren will have a chance to forge own stories that endure and inspire.
It’s quiet out there on the nature front, and the silence is deafening.
The choice of medium I use is its fusion of the credible documentary and interpreting qualities. It imposed on me cognitive discipline while all around I saw the evidence of growing cognitive dissonance, and its consequences. That is the metastasizing of the Polycrisis, the interaction of processes, and their outcomes creating a compounding effect worse that sum of its parts. And our growing inability in conflict resolution.
My starting point was investigating the democratic principle's status in public consciousness, and its real-life manifestations. The platform for my observations was a small section of the urban population in the industrial city of Hamilton, Ontario. I documented the city's transition difficulties in the post-industrial age. To assess the people’s stance, I invited them to interact with my work by writing their opinions on the work surface in the setting of a public gathering. The outcome illustrates the change in the urban population consciousness.
I stopped exhibiting my work for valid reasons, explained in Encounters.
I am ready to cooperate with artists and curators on projects with
a coherent vision, adequate visual material, space, and well-defined ideas about exhibiting and promoting it. I have many artwork exhibitions ready, with parallel, 4K, 8K, and 12K multi-screen presentations support.
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