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.
Central to the exhibition is a sublime immersive video installation, Deep Eclipse. 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.
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.
A lab-like group of assemblages, Gamma and Lambda, encapsulate layered images of massed virus particle populations on transparent film and metallic paper. The artist harvests and manipulates the digital virus images into spherical formats and patterns which she reanimates and reconfigures at will to form her mini micro-universes. Housed within acrylic boxes framed in fluoro colours they shimmer and gleam like exotic scientific specimens.
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.
