Karen Kunc | Wanting/Waiting will be on exhibition from April 7 - May 27 2023.
ARTIST STATEMENT
"Through my art I obliquely address environmental and politically charged awareness, while always creating poetically poignant visual images and beautiful, edgy visual sensations. My approach allows allusions to be drawn without being didactic, while inviting open-ended interpretations: land use and abuse, water rights/needs, genetic plant manipulation to bodily alterations, the human struggle against nature and for control, the effects of time and lifespan, and the wonders of intelligence, social relationships, chance interactions.
I draw from many sources: makeshift/manmade structures, patterns of decay and weathering, “everyday science” images of graphs or maps from weather charts to DNA to galaxies. I see compelling images and design elements such as a sense of compression, and geometric versus organic that formally reflect such ideas as a rhythmic design.
My approach to making woodcut prints is an evolutionary process that mirrors such processes in nature and our own effects on the earth. I recognize human and natural destruction and benevolence as abstract symbols, especially in our time of climate change with unknown consequences. There is a poignancy to this landscape of newly vulnerable, or toxic, evolving worlds of microbes, gaseous pools, and clouds, distended yet elegant forms in an imaginary place, discovered in my studio investigations."
- Karen Kunc