By: Mark Jenkins
Installation of Echoes of the Understory at gallery neptune & brown.
PLANTS ARE BOTH THE SUBJECT AND THE RAW MATERIAL of the print-drawings in Jowita Wyszormirska's Gallery Neptune & Brown show, "Echoes of the Understory." The local artist collects leaves, fronds, and stalks, which she later arranges as if they were scattered on a forest floor. (The show's title refers to the vegetation that grows beneath a tree canopy.) She uses high-temperature steam to transfer shapes and color to paper. These prints are then collaged and finally embellished with ink and pencil markings, which generally outline the nature-derived contours.
Wyszormirska's "eco-printing" technique yields images that are mostly soft and smudgy, but punctuated by the sharply defined structures of stems and leaf veins. The resulting colors, often unexpected, range from earthy to metallic; the artist sometimes accentuates areas of the latter in shimmery gold ink. The most surprising hues are bluish greens, more aqueous than leaf-like, and lush enough for the walls of Whistler's Peacock Room.
One of the most striking pictures is titled, fittingly, "Abundance of the Cosmos 1." These artworks are indeed abundant, in color, texture, and line. They're also rich in implications, suggesting nature's simultaneous delicacy and indomitability. Wyszormirska raids the woods, taking what she wants to make her abstracted hymns to the understory. Yet the realm she then leaves behind remains fundamentally unchanged.