Janusz Wrobel
in the art of seeing
Every day, everyone's life needs clean air, water, and food supplies.
What is the value of progress without their supply security?
Life is everything, and everything is only in Life.
The overview of all the projects. Formatted for desktop viewing as PDFs. Best option; browser set in presentation mode.
If "reality is a persistent illusion," it is still my choice over fiction or fantasy. Peeling one like an onion, getting rewarded by discovering its underlying structures, draws me in. The outcome is more practical and never boring. And is 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 mounting consequences from what were supposed to be improvements in our lives. And from the polarity of our views, making efforts at conciliatory problem-solving less effective.
It matters when social structures and relationships are severely challenged. Any contribution to Culture is pointless without clarity on how it serves the realities of our lives, defined more by algorithms and machines. How to refine the ways we communicate or the role of public cultural institutions?
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Project's Introductions
If Life is an opportunity of choice, its foundation was the one that mattered most. The unique properties of water molecules enable the bonding of all molecules in my body, their selection, protection, outcome, and gradual refinement. They also allow my brain to work, and my ability to understand all of it, if I elect to do so. The state of the collective consciousness today, and the clarity about what's common, is what is most relevant today.
On the water's edge, I often wonder what drives me and why. Thinking 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. And 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 misguided reasoning?
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My daily walks in the woods expose me to a host of intuitive references, to the archetypes and incarnations of unconditional relationships. And Nature's ways of storing and redistributing the sun's energy and facilitating water and carbon flows. Controlling air content, its behaviour through water vapour transfer and phase change. My daily marvel of meaningful 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 norms 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. While juggling all these tasks, the set of references of what works might be an eye-opener.
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I often felt lost, living between two seemingly 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 and promises. The 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, gratified by sightless 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. Space matters.
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Landscape as an art genre was characterized as an objective image of a land, inviting viewers to populate it with their own stories. For decades now, it appears as the platform of their authors' visions, focused more on forms, colours and styles than lands intrinsic functions. The historical works might still captivate an audience. In photography, it is a free-for-all web marketplace of detached "landscaped" images of everywhere.
Landscape is a space of Life possibility, carved out of physical matter, and populated by each of our ingrained perception of what it is. We are a landscape of what we can see in it. I frame them with my understandings explored in my projects. And nostalgic friendships once forged there, swarms of insects and birds slowly vanishing like old storylines. Wishing my grandchildren could forge their own stories there.
It’s hauntingly quiet out there on the Nature front. A deafening silence.
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The choice of medium I have been using 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. Like the metastasizing of the polycrisis. That is the interaction of processes and their outcomes, creating a compounding effect worse that sum of its parts. And human society's growing inability for conflict resolution while facing the future’s uncertainty.
My starting point was investigating the status of democratic principles in public consciousness and their 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 there the city's transition difficulties in the post-industrial age. To assess the people's bearing, I invited them to interact with my work by writing their opinions on the artwork surface in the setting of a larger public gathering. That has documented the ongoing changes in our social consciousness.
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I'm 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 them. I have many artworks exhibitions ready, with parallel 4K or 8K presentations for multi-screen presentation support. The links below will give you PDF's preview of one exhibition project, and a video presentation of what might be a part of the exhibition. Please inquire about the availability of high-quality materials.