By Chelsea Zhao
Staff Writer
O’Connor Art Gallery features artworks of Riverside artist Kim Piotrowski’s art installation Anxious Heaven from Jan. 26 to March 4.
Originally planned for 2021, the Anxious Heaven exhibit features 27 artworks by Kim Piotrowski that documented the divisive and unifying forces during the pandemic.
“This most recent body of work was all made during the pandemic and directly addresses that,” said Karen Azarnia, director of O’Connor Art Gallery. “So, between Black Lives Matter, the pandemic, environmental issues, and crisis, this work is really responding to our present time.”
“I think with the pandemic, all these kinds of undercurrents of that we’ve all been dealing with, whether it’s political whether it’s about the pandemic itself, racial injustice – a lot of these headlines that keep coming at us created a sort of rumble, a drumbeat, for many of us,” Piotrowski said. “Because we start thinking about where do I stand on my politics, where do I stand on the vaccine, becomes these sort of issues that divided us but also bring us together. And then, that sort of energy back and forth within our human social community, has fueled the work in this show.”
In titling her work Anxious Heaven, Piotrowski conveys a “personal reflection of where we are in the world,” the afterlife, and the meaning of our existence.
“I wanted to think about, what if heaven was more of a concept, or a being, or a body that is looking at us, saying these are the people coming to the gate, these are the people coming to us, and how we sort of reconcile who we are, in answering that kind of invitation to come,” Piotrowski said.
Piotrowski also created four site-specific artworks: Backside of Bliss, Backside of Grief, Backside of Regret and Backside of Love for the O’Connor Art Gallery. The artworks, completed in acrylic ink and latex paint in three weeks, hang upon three walls of the gallery and will be erased by the end of the month.
For Piotrowski, the temporal drawings illuminate the special yet timebound relationship between viewers and the artist.
“My hand has to the wall you have as a viewer and then, that’s it,” Piotrowski said. “After the show is done, they get covered over again. It’s something that parallels to how I see the preciousness of time of each other. It’s a genuine connection with the viewer.”
In naming the pieces after human emotions: grief, regret, love, and bliss, Piotrowski says she wants to show the personal and universal duality of these sentiments.
“When you do have an event in your life, whether it’s loss of somebody, falling in love, time can push things back and forward” Piotrowski said. “And I really want to capture in these drawings temporary quality, but also that slipping of time and zooming in to it: the sliding scale of experience.”
Piotrowski has shown her artworks nationally, internationally, and locally in 65Grand and Hyde Park Art Center.
Azarnia says the gallery plans the exhibit six months to a year in advance, with initial steps of reaching out to the artist, discussing show ideas, and detailing the course of the work installation.
An informed gallery walk with Piotrowski will take place on Saturday, Feb. 19, at 1 p.m. for the Dominican community.
Piotrowski’s installation is one of five exhibits the gallery plans for 2022. Anxious Heaven is followed by Juried Student Art Exhibition from March 30-April 6, senior thesis for the art and design department from April 18-29, and two professional exhibits in fall semester.
Azarnia joined Dominican in 2018 and worked 10 years at the Riverside Art Center. She is also a painter, artist and assistant professor at the Art Institute of Chicago. She hopes to feature a diverse selection of prospective in the program, both in terms of location and background.
“We want artists from all over; we had artists from New York and the West Coast, but we have a wonderful, rich pool of creatives right here in our backyard as well,” Azarnia said. “Also, [the gallery is] very interested in exhibiting underrepresented groups such as women artists, people of color — so that’s very important to the program as well.”
Qzhao@my.dom.edu