Location: Bushwick/Brooklyn, New York, US
Coordinates: 40°42’54″N 73°59’15″W
Documented: July 8 2024
Artwork Details: USB Power Adapter 06, 2024, 8″ x 7″ encaustic collage on panel
This work is featured in the exhibition digital twin : Consumer Layers, a Digital Twin project. We ask you to slow down and look, to fight against our collective habit to swipe and scroll.
Slow down. Focus. View the work.
Artist Statement
My current work utilizes recycled cardboard, sandwiched within layers of pigmented encaustic. Underpinning this work is my interest in consumerism and its accompanying waste and packaging. Packaging is not only the refuse of consumerism, but the wrapping of it, too. Its physicality is malleable, yet always recognizable, offering many modes of presentation. And like one of my earlier obsessions, bubble wrap, it contains an inherent tension between the organic and the geometric as it begins to break down after being subjected to various processes, with wisps or hints of corrugation often the last recognizable clue to what I’ve done. On a less concrete level, the double entendre of “packaging” allows me to re-present, (or re-package) these scraps, creating mementos and embalming them to function as time-capsule-like objects, possible future reminders of how casually careless we were with our only earth. The imagery the finished pieces imply is elusive and subjective, but often they evoke dystopian landscapes or ill-defined blueprints of submerged abstract structures. Many things mechanical and/or scientific are suggested, but too elusive to grasp, a metaphor for our current societal argument with factual/scientific knowledge.
Joanne Ungar is Brooklyn based by way of Minneapolis. Her studies began as a liberal arts major at Oberlin College and moved to work in collage to focus on assemblage of disparate forms and earn a BFA from the School of Visual Arts. Her evolution continued in the studio where she continued to develop a complex sense of color to create luminous layered encaustic artwork from commercial packaging and ephemera found on the streets of Brooklyn and pigmented beeswax. In a continuous pursuit of her vision, she often tinkers with her approach to get the desired lucidity for what she is burying or revealing in layers of wax.
Digital Twin is a digital based project aimed at presenting a fresh perspective. It is artwork captured digitally in an original location, showcasing the interplay of light on surfaces, that alters the way art is experienced and opening the viewer up to novel ways of seeing. In this digital environment we ask the viewer to slow down and look, to fight against our collective habit to swipe and scroll.