About Maggie

Artist Statements:

Swallowed

In Progress: A large scale multi media installation by Maggie Nowinski

Plastic water bottles exist in the daily periphery of our environments, like the tap, tap, tapping of a leaking faucet, the ticking of a clock counting down to a dangerous event. As they assimilate into the corners of our environments, we swallow the methods of the bottled water industry that manufacture and advertise their contents using notions of purity and health.

Obsessed by an awareness of plastic water bottles I started collecting and working with them. Since late 2007 I have been developing a project that explores my relationship with the plastic water phenomenon. Looking at my own discomfort about participating in the world I live in, physically and psychologically, as I continually adjust to the sensation of impending doom that comes from living in today’s world, I explore the internalization of anxiety, the absorption of customary practices as normal and the impact of social and commercial processes on the individual. When I drink bottled water, the process is paradoxical – rejuvenating yet emotionally numbing. Swallowed will culminate in an installation including hundreds of photographs, thousands of plastic water bottles, video projects, audio recordings and drawings.

When we drink water we experience a somatic moment at the site where the external and internal meet – a primitive experience of a basic need being met. Plastic bottling has invaded this moment. We drink plastic water, part of a system that extends beyond the simple and immediate practice of drinking water. The residue of this process leaves internal traces in the body as it passes through our bodies – evidenced in the quenching of thirst, urinating and sweating.

2006-2008

My work often investigates separation in relation to a fragmented identity. Separation permeates all aspects of my life and facilitates my understanding. It effects my psychological identity emotionally and conceptually. When we separate self from other, we allow the illusion of definitions or meanings to seem fixed.

I often leave open the possibility for an opposite or an alternative to be perceived in my work. This reflects how I operate internally. Empathy, with a reminder that nothing is fixed.

Frequency Vertebrae: A Studio Process in Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture (September, 2008)

This exhibition represents a segment of a current of movement in my studio art process. The paintings, drawings and sculpture are an emotional and conceptual response to my search for connections, meaning and communication. This inquiry occurs via natural and unnatural frequencies and in the midst of the overwhelming circumstances of waste and the exploitive practices of consumer culture all of which leave an imprint on my body and internally and externally. Painting and drawing function is a means for me to meditate, make sense of and reflect on these ideas as I attempt to locate a central pattern or visual vertebrae.

2007 Installation

The Fort:

The video loop inside represents a self-defining moment. The projected image, vacillating in and out of focus, is conveyed using a camera obscura technique. The packing slip envelopes hold memorabilia and objects with personal associations. This assembly represents a gesture stemming from anxiety around a particular memory, and simultaneously, a conflicted future desire. The anxiety is fueled by fear, separation, subsequent loss and the fragmented identity I have come to own. The relationship between the external and internal of the fort and the personal packing slips provides more than just a self-portrait, but asks: how does a traumatic moment become identified and how does it effect an individual’s subjectivity, sense of self, and personal narrative?

The Nest:

In it’s simplicity and strength it holds its place as an object, as an archetype, as an idea. However, the nest is not inhabitable by any means; it is made of sharp edged metal strips and flimsy cardboard and meant to give the sense that the nest is both a refuge and a trap. The Fort and the Nest function separately and within dialectical relation to one another. The Fort asks about the past and present, the Nest the future.

2006:

What does it all boil down to? I am exploring my attraction to symbolic imagery, representation, and semiotics. In one memory project I allow the computer spell check to choose replacements for misspelled words, as a gesture for letting my memories become altered, as one does in the process of speaking. I am not so much interested in the content of memory, but the metaphor it provokes with relation to language. There is a disconnect that I am seduced by, and struggle with, in my relationship with language.  I examine how words fall short or mislead. The project conveys a paradox: the stories recede with each person I read them to, with more misspell-checked words added — memories meant to be heard but each time they are spoken, the more they disappeared.

2005:

Maggie is at present working on a few projects including large scale Peel Paintings, which formally and conceptually reflect the “nature” of large scale billboards found in urban settings. These paintings are multiple part constructs and include a variety of self referential, self-appropriated imagery. She is also working on multi media installations that explore language, identity and subjectivity.