ELWIRA SKOWRONSKA

DEEP ECLIPSE
Barbara Dowse - Curator

The allure, the wonder, the inherent art and beauty beyond the science and deadly scourge that is SARS-Co-V-2 inspires Elwira Skowronska’s Deep Eclipse. Lured by the awe and romance of an infinite inter-galactic meta-sphere and the minutiae of its nano molecular particles, the artist opens a portal to the sensory and sublime beyond the biological and socially alarming.

She conceives of an exotic cellular solar eclipse with the minute virus, configured of a glowing corona surrounding a central sphere orbiting within its vast sub-visual universe. The planetary phenomenon metaphorically mirrors the obliterating darkness and shadow cast across the Earth by the global pandemic; while the subsequent emergence into light is a radiant symbol of hope at its passing.

A series of Eclipse paintings is created in Skowronska’s distinctive style. Myriad meticulously applied and layered minute paint particles in a limited pallette of hues of a single colour morph to reveal a spherical form visually embedded within the paintings’ square formats.

Eclipse 1 is in celestial blue-on-blue, its palette restricted to resonating hues of cerulean, cobalt and ultramarine. Eclipse 2, in the way of the virus, is a variation or mutation. It is the same in composition and size, but a different order and ratio of a similar blue colour palette.

Smaller paintings, Eclipse 5 and 6 shimmer with silver and gold, evoking the deep darks and glowing aureoles of lunar and solar eclipses. Nascent orbs evolve here also, emerging optically within the surfaces of silver and gold leaf and glinting metallic paint.

In Deep Eclipse, through adaptation of innovative algorithmic techniques and her distinctive meticulous pointillist painting style of optical reveal, Elwira Skowronska romantically re-imagines the micro-cellular world of the sinister virus to embrace a new manner of sublime that is at once terrifying, yet undoubtedly mysteriously alluring.

The subject of my artwork is the invisible sublime world that surrounds us at micro-scale. I investigate this through landscapes of nano worlds using a matrix of dots and pixels and the dynamic flux of spaces between them. It is underpinned by an approach that integrates a scientific study of Neo-Impressionist painting techniques and computer graphic imagery, to uncover the sub-visible material world that we inhabit.

I have been intrigued by the world beyond what the eye can see ever since I was a child. The current pandemic intensified this research. Everyday life under Covid-19 has confirmed the importance of understanding the micro world as a visually alluring yet terrifying infinity of minutiae. This new sublime is radically different from the traditional sublime of spectacular large-scale objects explored by Romantic artists and philosophers. In my work the sublime of minutiae is a chaotic yet tranquil vortex of particles interacting in an immersive space. It is based on recent scientific discoveries in biology and physics that reveal the invisible world of micro reality as far more determinant of the everyday world than we could ever imagine.

In Kolor I painted fields of minute colour specks across paper surfaces based on translating static and moving digital images into pictorial form. The resulting pulsating intensities create a cascade of oscillating minutiae that mesmerise our attention and suggest the micro-space beneath. The brush points are minimal yet reveal the meticulous focus of my hand as it creates a rainbow of dots that navigate us into the micro-materiality of the world.

Barbara Dowse - Curator

Deep Eclipse is a sublime 3D immersive video installation. It embraces multiple scenarios simulating sequences and clusters of the mutating SARS_2 virion. becomes. The inherent beauty, singing colours and jewel like encrustations of the molecule’s whirling orb is explored close up as a minute speck, from both inside and from afar as it trails ribbons of sinuous dancing colour into deep, deep infinite dark. Elwira Skowronska developed the programming for the 3D installation with software engineer Rafael Formosa, while Artist-in-Residence at the world leading iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema, at UNSW, Sydney.

Apart from 3D installation Deep Eclipse there are three 3 minutes videos: Starburst, Gravity and Void.

Spectrum Series is my response to the micro reality of Covid-19, exploring its disruptive and dynamic nature. It comprises a duratrans film with a computer graphic generated image of particles, floating over a metallic print in a perspex box. Creating a double layered space of interacting particles it evokes the unpredictable nature of this world. As we move our eyes across the face of the box, particle waves are refracted in unexpected ways, creating fluid streams of light that mutate as they interact with each other.

Spectrum allows us to navigate into the interior of this micro world. As we gaze through the side of the box, we are confronted with another worldly space populated by bands of unexpected chromatic spectrums. Like Alice in the novel Through the looking glass, it propels us to dive beneath the visible, to befriend the invisible as a pulsating galaxy of micro-worlds that escape our grasp, forcing as to look again at the world we thought we knew.