- tata -
- 'tata' - Karolina Gnatowski -
1970's psychedelic Americana
housewares
home invasions
The Doors
jacquard looms
alcoholism
Los Angeles sunsets
At first blush this list seems a bit disjunctive; soon the overtones begin to resonate. Harmonies form and the melodies begin to reveal themselves. Music is often described as weaving; 'baselines moving in and around the melody' for example. In the works presented this fall at SideCar, Karolina Gnatowski has deftly pulled together not only this short list of intellectual threads but, quite literally the threads that make up this group of objects.
Karolina grew up in the Pocono mountains in the 1990's, a place she describes as being "frozen in the 1970's" because the local vacation/resort economy died. As a result, there was no money to keep up with overall cultural style changes locally. Complicating her surroundings further was the marketing onslaught of MTV's so-called Rockumentaries about 1970's rock bands and Oliver Stone's biopic about The Doors, released in 1991. As a young person at the time, her trolling of thrift stores became a game of sifting through 90s copies of 70's articles in order to try and find the authentic pieces.
Karolina has been working on a series of 27 objects based on the 1970's rock band, The Doors and the state of California (or more accurately the mythologies surrounding The Doors and California). The series started out as a rumination on The Doors, Jim Morrison and inside jokes regarding the practice of weaving. She often employs word-play within her work. Fairly quickly the humor began to be pushed out as those mythologies surfaced, bringing in the California lifestyle, Jim Morrison's alcoholism and, as she says "the truth you think you know about something and someone and how that is disrupted as new information is unearthed". As the series has gone on, the darker side of these themes has bubbled ever closer to the surface. The pieces, often beginning as domestic objects, 'housewares', have begun to be transformed into memorials and monuments. That transformation has recently hit close to home as her fathers illness has taken center stage in her life.
Karolina lives and works in Chicago. She has shown with Monique Meloche Gallery and Lloyd Dobler Gallery in Chicago, Brooklyn Academy of Music and Gowanus Ballroom in Brooklyn, NY, Bruce High Quality Foundation in NYC and the Hammock Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. She has participated in a number of group shows at SideCar. This will be Karolina's first solo show with the gallery.
Opening Reception - Saturday, September 26th, 5 PM - 10 PM
September 26th - October 24th, 2015