• SCOTT WOLNIAK:
  • You Can Lose Your Balance

  • February 19 - March 20, 2010
  • Opening Reception: Friday, February 19 (7-10PM)

  • 65GRAND is pleased to present Scott Wolniak in his first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show is a continuation of Wolniak's work in video, as well as a marked return to painting.

  • In his single-channel video projection Flash Art (Circles and Rectangles), Wolniak presents the viewer with a close-up of a common studio clip-light being turned repeatedly on and off. Manipulating the composition by resizing and layering audio and video tracks, Wolniak constructs a flicker effect that progresses to disorienting limits. The clicking spiral of shapes traps light in various stages of haloed expansion and contraction.Like a trance-inducing metamorphosis, the firing light-bulb at times becomes a kind of eye, turning the gaze back on the viewer. Creating a deer-in-the-headlights experience that seduces with its hypnotic momentum and particle inertia, Wolniak's optical crescendo leads one to an event horizon of the senses.

  • The paintings are a collection of cracked and battered canvases, where whiteness has been wrinkled into waterscape and emotion hammered into form. Visibly splintered stretcher bars remind one of a compound fracture or the collapsed remains of an overburdened tree. Sticks, bricks, and bottle caps are frozen projectiles, sent flying into a fight between composition and frustration, breaking the surface of our expectations. Tension in the contorted framework and buckled canvas registers as the embodiment of absurd action, compelling a contemplation of motive. One becomes witness to the crystallized wreckage of Wolniak's gestural demolition. Like snapshots of dysfunction, his paintings capture moments of frustration and volatility - expressing a spirit that is humorous and jarring, and playfully destructive.

  • Scott Wolniak lives and works in Chicago. He earned his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2002 and currently teaches in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Chicago. Wolniak has exhibited internationally including London, Berlin, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Houston. Running concurrent to this show is an exhibition of related works on paper at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Peter Norton Collection, Santa Monica, and the Stenn Family Collection, Chicago, among others, and has received critical attention in publications such as Art in America, The New Yorker, The Houston Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, Art News and artforum.com.